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Updated: Apr 19, 2026
Habituation and Prepulse Inhibition of Acoustic Startle in Rodents
Published on: September 1, 2011
Acoustic prepulse inhibition: one ear is better than two, but why and when?
Veena Kumari1, Aseel Hamid, Andrew Brand
1Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King's College London, UK; NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Abstract:
We examined whether monaural prepulses produce more prepulse inhibition (PPI) because they might be more attention capturing (unambiguous to locate) than binaural prepulses. Monaural and binaural PPI was tested under normal and verbal and visuospatial attention manipulation conditions in 55 healthy men, including 29 meditators. Attention manipulations abolished monaural PPI superiority, similarly in meditators and meditation-naïve individuals, and this was most strongly evident for right ear PPI under visuospatial attention manipulation. Meditators performed better than meditation-naïve individuals on attention tasks (verbal: more targets detected; visuospatial: faster reaction time). Spatial attention processes contribute to monaural PPI, particularly with the right ear. Better attentional performance, with similar attentional modulation of PPI, may indicate a stronger attentional capacity in meditators, relative to meditation-naïve individuals.
