Directed Attention in Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

摘要: Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (TS) is a basal ganglia (BG) disorder, associated not only with hyperkinetic movements but also attentional impairments. This experiment sought to ascertain whether overt direct visual attention would influence tactile performance in TS, via the use of vibrotactile choice reaction time procedure involving biased probabilities event occurrence. Participants were required look (i.e., gaze) either at hand receiving most (expected) vibrations, or less often stimulated (the unexpected), for both crossed and uncrossed arm postures. Contrary our predictions, gaze did TS patients. Furthermore, patients found be sensitive distributions probability; that is, they demonstrate normal expectancy effects like controls. Attentional deficits (as Parkinson’s disease, another BG disorder) may pertain more difficulties holding rather than shifting focus attention. Moreover, directing towards unexpected locus posture improved overall controls, suggesting increased task demands (e.g., posture), and/or stimulus location, alleviated by directed These impairments stem from dysfunction circuits linking frontal lobes BG.