Attenzione visuo-spaziale endogena: definizione e sue disfunzioni indotte da diverse patologie neurologiche e variabili cliniche

Introduction. Visuospatial attention can be guided by endogenous factors such as memory contents; this allows to shape subjects’ behaviour from an adap- tive-utilitarian perspective. Although this effect of memory traces on attention (Contextual cueing) has been widely investigated in healthy populations, to date its neuronal mechanisms and its characterization in pathological pop- ulations are still unclear. The present review aims to sys- tematically analyse the available literature data on mem- ory-guided orienting of attention in populations affected by neurological diseases. We hypothesized that the het- erogeneity of the available results could be explained by the effect of different clinical variables, such as type of disease (degenerative vs not degenerative) and disease duration. Methods. Two different bibliographic searches were conducted on the PubMed search engine, including only empirical articles in English, conducted on neurologi- cal populations with Contextual cueing tasks. Results. 12 articles fulfilled the inclusion criteria and were included in the present review. No statistically significant associations between the presence/absence of Contextual cueing and, respectively, type of disease and global cognitive function- ing index were found (Fisher’s exact test, p=1). It was not possible to investigate the association with disease dura- tion and different cognitive domains scores due to limit- ed data availability. Discussion. The lack of association between Contextual cueing and disease type can be ex- plained by the extreme heterogeneity of the investigated clinical populations. The limited availability of clinical data did not allow to evaluate the effect of disease duration on the behavioural data nor a possible association between Contextual cueing and specific cognitive domains deficits. The definition of a shared protocol including an exhaustive collection of clinical, experimental, and neuropsychological data would therefore be desirable to better understand and characterize this crucial cognitive function in neuro- logical populations.