Prism adaptation influences perception but not attention: evidence from antisaccades

Abstract

Prism adaptation has been shown to successfully alleviate symptoms of hemispatial neglect, yet the underlying mechanism is still poorly understood. In this study, the antisaccade task was used to measure the effects of prism adaptation on spatial attention in healthy participants. Results indicated that prism adaptation did not influence the saccade latencies or antisaccade errors, both strong measures of attentional deployment, despite a successful prism adaptation procedure. In contrast to visual attention, prism adaptation evoked a perceptual bias in visual space as measured by the landmark task. We conclude that prism adaptation has a differential influence on visual attention and visual perception in healthy participants as measured by the tasks used.