Attentional bias in normal subjects performing visual and tactile radial line bisections

Misbisection of lines is thought to represent an attentional bias. When radial lines (intersection of the midsagittal and transverse planes) are presented below eye level, normal subjects are biased toward far peripersonal space in the visual modality and to near peripersonal space in the tactile modality. These errors may be related to a body centered, a retinotopic, or an object centered attentional bias. The purpose of this study was to contrast the body centered and retinotopic-objective centered hypotheses by having 12 normal subjects perform visual and tactile bisections of radial lines that are above and below eye level. The top of the page, which may be defined by retinotopic or object centered coordinates, contains the portion of the line that is most distant from our bodies when the page is below eye level. However, above eye level, the top of a radial line would be the portion of the page that is most proximal to our bodies. We observed that when stimuli are presented below eye level, normal subjects have a visual bias toward far peripersonal space or the top of the page or both, and have a tactile bias in the opposite direction. In the above eye position we found no overall bias in either modality. Because above eye level the body centered bias should have remained the same but the retinotopic or object centered bias should have reversed, our results suggest that the body and object centered or retinotopic biases, which are oriented in opposite directions, nullified each other.