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L. D. Démina
NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS
O F ATTENTION
52
The Neurophysiology of Attention 53
-
spheres a r e presented. For most of the patients the site of
the lesion was verified during surgery. For the others it was
verified on the basis of the clinical picture of the disease and
by contrast methods. A l l the patients underwent a neuropsy-
chological examination. The study was done at the Laboratory
of Neuropsychology of Moscow State University and the Bur-
denko Institute of Neurosurgery of the USSR Academy of Medi-
cal Sciences.
Method
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Center Center
Left field of vision
Right
hand
I1 2
!
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- R' - sL
X lOO%, where SR is the a r e a of the evoked
Kas - Smax
potential in the right hemisphere and SL is i t s a r e a in the left
hemisphere.
Following E. Yu. Artem'eva's suggestion, we introduced the
index A , which characterizes the planimetric divergence of one
potential from another, to evaluate the reliability of variations
in EPs in different situations. For this purpose we distinguished
the most typical forms for the a r e a s under the curve, whose propor-
tions were determined for both involuntary and voluntary atten-
tion (Figure 2). To construct the limits of significant changes
58 L. D. Demina
A B I L R
I I
Figure 3. Examples of E P s of normal subjects in the premotor
sections of the left and right hemispheres after central and
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Results
Lateral
Right -side Left -side
Central stimulation stimulation
Parietal - Parietal- P r e - Parietal- Pre-
Series occipital P r e - occipital motor occipital motor
No. sections motor sections sections sections sections
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I 10.1 20 35 30.9 38 34
I1 20.0 18 37 14 43 15.8
ma 14.7 24 22 45 24.8 36
b 20.3 40.8 30 41
Note: a - motor responses of right hand; b - motor r e -
sponses of left hand.
where it was 24.8% and 20.3%, and 3Ho and 22%, respectively.
The waves Ngo and P220 (in the parietal-occipital sections) and
N150 and P230 (in the premotor sections) were the most asym-
metric .
A heightening of attention as subjects performed tests with
stimuli made the configuration of the latter section of the re-
sponse more complicated (additional EP waves with a latency
of P290-380 appeared; these were absent in the case of involun-
tary attention).
The significance of the changes in the late components of
evoked potentials in different states was 40% to 92% in theA
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patients
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n
Figure 4. Chief forms of disorders in the dynamic pattern of
E P s and in interhemispheric asymmetry of late E P waves in
different experimental conditions in patients with frontal lobe
lesions. Legend same as in Figure 3.
medial and basal frontal structures. If, on the other hand, the
lesion w a s in the convex sections of the frontal lobes o r if it
generally did not affect mediobasal structures, a brief resto -
ration of normal EP patterns was observed. But this effect
was very brief and showed up only as a faint, unsteady, and late
activation and in a paradoxical phenomenon.
Completely different patterns of change in the parameters of
the late components of EPs were observed for patients with
lesions elsewhere than in the frontal lobes. In these patients
a situation of involuntary attention w a s also accompanied by
various abnormalities in the dynamic pattern of the EPs; how-
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Discussion
Conclusions
References