Removal of all contiguous visual cortical areas of one hemisphere results in a contralateral hemianopia. Subsequent deactivation of the contralesional superior colliculus (SC) nullifies the effects of the visual cortex ablation and restores visual orienting responses into the cortically blind hemifield. This deficit nullification has become known as the "Sprague Effect." Similarly, in the audit...

BACKGROUND Visual orienting is inconsistently reported to be impaired in autism. METHODS We conducted a meta-analysis on visual orienting in autism. We focused on studies that used a Posner-type task. A total of 18 research papers published between 1993 and 2011 were included in our meta-analysis. We examined the effects of differences in experimental design as well as differences in particip...

Converging evidence from neuroimaging as well as lesion and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies has been obtained for the involvement of right ventral posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in exogenous orienting. However, the contribution of dorsal PPC to attentional orienting, particularly endogenous orienting, is still under debate. In an informative peripheral cueing paradigm, in which...

Attention can be directed to a location in the absence of overt signs of orienting, a phenomenon termed "covert orienting." The ability to orient attention covertly has been well documented in humans, but recent progress has been made with the operational definition of the processes involved in covert orienting. Reaction times to visual targets are quickened when attention is drawn to the locat...

Two fundamental cognitive functions, selective attention and processing of time, have been simultaneously explored in recent studies of temporal orienting of attention. A temporal-orienting procedure may consist of a temporal analogue to the Posner's paradigm, such that symbolic cues indicate the most probable moment for target arrival. Behavioral measures suggest that performance is improved f...

The literature has long emphasized the neocortex's role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner's classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a target. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stre...

Pseudoneglect is traditionally viewed as reflecting right hemisphere specialization for processing spatial information, resulting in orienting toward the contralateral, left, hemispace. Recent evidence suggests that healthy individuals differ from each other in both direction and magnitude of orienting bias, and moreover, the bias displayed by a person is consistent across time, suggesting that...

Parts manufactured to tolerances have variations in shape. Most previous work in robotic manipulation assumes that parts do not have shape variations. Orienting devices such as bowl feeders often fail due to variations in part shape. We study the effects of uncertainty in part shape on orienting to develop systems that can orient toleranced polygonal parts. We present a tolerance model in which...

In the past decade, much has been elucidated regarding the functional organization of the axonal connection of olfactory sensory neurons to olfactory bulb (OB) glomeruli. However, the manner in which projection neurons of the OB process odorant input and send this information to higher brain centers remains unclear. Here, we report long-range, large-scale tracing of the axonal projection patter...

Others' gaze and emotional facial expression are important cues for the process of attention orienting. Here, we investigated with magnetoencephalography (MEG) whether the combination of averted gaze and fearful expression may elicit a selectively early effect of attention orienting on the brain responses to targets. We used the direction of gaze of centrally presented fearful and happy faces a...