A Meta-analysis of Perceptual Pseudoneglect reveals the Functional Anatomy of Perceptual Judgements

Major evidence for a right-hemisphere dominance of the brain in spatial and/or attentional tasks comes from lesion studies in patients with spatial neglect. However, the neuroanatomy of the different forms of neglect remains a matter of debate, and it remains unclear how dysfunctions in neglect relate to intact processes. In the healthy brain, perceptual pseudoneglect has been considered to be a phenomenon complementary to specific subtypes of neglect as observed in paradigms such as the line bisection task. Therefore, the current study investigated the intact functional anatomy of perceptual pseudoneglect using a meta-analysis to compensate for some of the limitations of individual imaging studies. We collated the data from 24 articles that tested 952 participants with a range of paradigms (landmark task, line bisection, grating-scales task, and number line task) obtaining 337 foci. Using Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) we identified a right-hemisphere biased network of cortical areas, including superior and intraparietal regions, the intraoccipital sulcus together with other occipital regions, as well as inferior frontal areas that were associated with perceptual pseudoneglect in partial agreement with lesion studies in patients with neglect. Our study is the first meta-analysis on the mechanisms underlying perceptual judgments which have been shown to give rise to perceptual pseudoneglect.