Cerebellar Lesions Impair Reflexive but not Voluntary Covert Attention

Preliminary Findings

Abstract

Recent research has revealed that the cerebellum is involved in much more than just motor output. Interestingly, functional neuroimaging studies and human lesion studies have discovered that the cerebellum has been reported to be involved in various cognitive roles such as language, emotion, and attention. Specifically, our lab is interested in aspects of attention such as reflexive and voluntary covert attention. Previously, a neuroimaging study from our lab showed increased activity in the left cerebellum for covert reflexive attention compared to covert voluntary attention. However, this idea has not been directly tested behaviorally in patients with cerebellar lesions. Therefore, the current study examined how 10 patients with cerebellar lesions performed on reflexive and voluntary covert attention tasks. The results indicated that the cerebellar patients have a slowed onset of inhibition of return compared healthy-age matched controls (n=10). In addition, deficits in reflexive covert attention appeared to be linked with damage to the lateral cerebellum. In contrast, there were no differences between the patients and controls in the voluntary attention task. The current study provides converging evidence that the cerebellum may be more involved for reflexive covert attention compared to voluntary covert attention.

Discipline: Psychology Honours

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Christopher Striemer