g., Clay et al., 2005; Owsley et al., 1995). UFOV tests typically involve making judgements on a central

item whilst attempting to discriminate peripheral items, often with concurrent distractors. Older adults who, despite having intact visual fields, are poor at this test are more dangerous drivers as indexed by measures including road accidents and driver simulator performance (Clay et al., 2005). SB431542 mw Crucially, these studies have not modulated the amount of attention required in the central task in order to examine how this impacts on deployment of attention to peripheral items. Some investigations have also reported that older participants might suffer from an AB that is longer and of greater magnitude (e.g., Georgiou-Karistianis et al., 2007; Maciokas and Crognale, 2003), but no studies have examined perception across the visual field in these paradigms. In our second experiment, we used our paradigm to probe deployment of attention over space and time within healthy ageing when participants perform a demanding task at fixation. Five patients with right hemisphere stroke participated in the study. Patients were aged from 55 to 75 (mean 66 years). All were in-patients at the Fondazione Santa Lucia Neuro-Rehabilitation Hospital in Rome, Italy. They had suffered from their stroke on average 12 weeks prior to entering the research programme. Brain lesions, imaged by CT or MRI, were

reconstructed with MRICro software (http://www.sph.sc.edu/comd/rorden/mricro.html), selleck kinase inhibitor plotted with the use of a graphics tablet (WACOM Intuos A4). See Fig. 1 for lesion mapping images, which demonstrate widespread involvement including

frontal and parietal regions. Scans were unavailable for one patient (the radiology report stated that there was damage to right frontal, parietal and temporal regions affecting cortical and sub-cortical structures). None of the patients Racecadotril suffered from neglect at the time of testing according to a standard clinical examination. All patients had intact visual fields as tested by confrontation, 4/5 patients had constructional apraxia as revealed by performance on the Rey–Osterrieth complex figure and block design of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Patients were compared with five age-matched healthy control participants. Their ages ranged from 56 to 70 (mean 65 years), all reported normal/corrected to normal vision. All participants gave written informed consent according to the Declaration of Helsinki. The study was approved by both the hospital and university research ethics committees. The experiment was programmed with Psyscope software (Cohen et al., 1993) run from a Macintosh G4 laptop computer. A small white diamond shape (1° across, see Fig. 2) was presented at fixation with either its top or bottom apex missing. During the low load condition only the diamond was presented in the centre.