2019 Volume 39 Issue 4 Pages 412-420
Patients with left unilateral spatial neglect may have a wide range of attentional deficits not restricted to spatial inattention towards the left side. Previous studies showed that auditory non-verbal stimulation might activate the ability to maintain arousa (l alertness) and improve patientsʼ leftward search. However, there has been no study that clarified the effects of auditory-verbal stimulation. The purpose of this study was to test whether task-related auditory-verbal stimulation would improve patientsʼ performance.
The subjects were seven right-handed patients (five males and two females) with left unilateral spatial neglect caused by right hemisphere stroke. We used a red circle cancellation task and asked the patients to cross out all the red circles on the test paper. Then we set four experimental conditions: (1) the control condition which presented no auditory stimulus, (2) the irrelevant word condition which presented an irrelevant word (kie) , (3) the target word condition which presented a word indicating the target color (red) , and (4) the direction word condition which presented a word indicating the direction (left) . We also employed a simple response task to assess the non-spatial attentional abilities.
The cancellation rates of the direction word and target word conditions were significantly higher than that of the control condition. Four among the seven patients showed a non-spatial attentional deficits. The correlations between HDS-R scores and the cancellation rates of the experimental conditions which presented auditory verbal stimul (iirrelevant word condition, target word condition, direction word condition) were higher than that of the control condition.
The results suggest that auditory-verbal stimulation may activate a wide range of attention and improve the performance of patients with left unilateral spatial neglect. Results also suggest the effects of auditory-verbal stimulation may depend on the level of patientʼs intellectual function.
