Attention network impairments in patients with focal frontal or parietal lesions

Recently, research on attention has focused on 3 networks that are linked to separate brain regions, i.e. orienting, alerting, and executive control. The attention network test (ANT) is one of the methods to measure the three attention functions. However, neuropsychological investigations have not examined the anatomical disassociation of different attention networks with the same task. We compared the efficiencies of the 3 networks between brain-damaged patients (27 frontal lesions, 20 temporal lesions, and 21 parietal lesions) and healthy controls (N=58) with ANT. Comparing the brain damaged group with the normal controls, a reduced efficiency of the executive network was found in patients with frontal lobe and parietal lobe injuries, and there was also a deficit in the orienting network in patients with parietal lobe injuries. Analysis of lateralization indicated the right hemisphere superiority to the alerting system. The present study found that the three attentional networks were selectively impaired following brain damage which affected different areas in the brain.