Unchanged EEG correlates of covert visual spatial attention after prism adaptation in healthy subjects

Abstract

Behavioural effects of prism adaptation in healthy subjects and neglect patients suggest a link between prism adaptation and spatial attention. A recent study found an effect of prism adaptation on several EEG correlates of spatial attention, but for two other correlates (the P3 component of the oddball ERP and alpha lateralization), the relationship remained unclear. In the current experiment, 10 healthy subjects performed a visual spatial attention task which was optimized for eliciting these two brain signals. This task was performed before and after adaptation to prism glasses with a leftward optical deviation. While prism adaptation induced a rightward bias on a pointing task, there was no effect of adaptation on behavioural performance on the spatial attention task. Moreover, the P3 component of the ERP and alpha lateralization were not influenced by prism adaptation. Together, these results show that some EEG correlates of visual spatial attention remain unchanged after prism adaptation, a finding which has its implications for current models of the neurocognitive mechanisms behind prism adaptation.