title: Listening to white noise counteracts visual and haptic pseudoneglect.
abstract: Neurologically intact individuals usually show a leftward bias in line bisection, a tendency known as "pseudoneglect", likely reflecting a right-hemisphere dominance in controlling the allocation of spatial attention. Studies in brain-damaged patients with left visuospatial neglect have reported that auditory stimulation may reduce the deficit, both in a spatially dependent and in a spatially independent way. Here we show for the first time that the concurrent binaural presentation of auditory white noise affects healthy individuals' performance in both visual and haptic bisection, reducing their leftward error. We suggest that this effect depends on the noise boosting alertness and restoring the hemispheric activation balance. Our data clearly show that task-irrelevant auditory noise crossmodally affects the allocation of spatial resources in both the haptic and the visual space; future research may clarify whether these effects are specific for the type of auditory stimulation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy. zaira.cattaneo@unimib.it
authors.forename: Zaira
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Cattaneo
authors.forename: Carlotta
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lega
authors.forename: Tomaso
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Vecchi
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vallar
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult