Monocular Eye Patching and the Posner Paradigm

Not Applicable

• Conditions: R29.5; R46.4; Slowness and poor responsiveness

• Registration Number: DRKS00025461
• Lead Sponsor: Carl von Ossietzky Universität OldenburgDepartment für Psychologie

Brief Summary

nilateral brain lesions can lead to impaired contralesional attention and reduced ipsilesional and enhanced contralesional superior colliculus (SC) activity. We aimed to investigate whether modulation of SC activation via monocular eye patching can improve contralesional attention. Twenty left-hemispheric (LH) and 20 right-hemispheric (RH) patients with an acute or subacute middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke completed an endogenous version of the Posner cueing task twice, while the left or right eye was covered with an eye patch. The LH and RH patients showed significantly slower reactions to contralesional than to ipsilesional stimuli. In addition, the eye patch modulated responses to invalidly but not those to validly cued stimuli. Post hoc analyses could not discriminate whether this effect pertained to a particular target side or eye patch position. However, exploratory analyses indicated that the observed eye patch effect might affect the RH group more than the LH group. As predicted 36 years ago, monocular eye patching modulates visuospatial attention, presumably due to differences in SC activation between the two eye patch conditions. However, this modulation seems too weak and unspecific, and therefore possibly not strong enough to be a treatment option for patients with visuospatial attention impairments.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2021-06-10
• Study Completion: 2022-08-15
• Results First Posted: 2023-05-28
• Last Update Posted: 19 August 2024

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: Complete
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 40

Inclusion Criteria

Acute left or right-hemispheric stroke, sufficient visual capacity in both eyes, sufficient resilience for the duration of the examination (ca. 20-30 min), mobilizability into the chair or wheelchair, sufficient language and task comprehension.

Exclusion Criteria

Diagnosed dementia, normal-pressure hydrocephalus.

Study & Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Reaction times towards valid and invalid left- and right-sided targets while wearing a left- or right-sided eye patch, measured with the subtest Covered shift of attention of the TAP.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Apples Cancellation Task, line bisection, clock drawing