@article{2169caf5dfe14c3591e4a063189de91a,
title = "Revisiting the Landmark Task as a tool for studying hemispheric specialization: What's really right?",
abstract = "The “Landmark Task” (LT) is a line bisection judgment task that predominantly activates right parietal cortex. The typical version requires observers to judge bisections for horizontal lines that cross their egocentric midline and therefore may depend on spatial attention as well as spatial representation of the line segments. To ask whether the LT is indeed right-lateralized regardless of spatial attention (for which the right hemisphere is known to be important), we examined LT activation in 26 neurologically healthy young adults using vertical (instead of horizontal) stimuli, as compared with a luminance control task that made similar demands on spatial attention. We also varied task difficulty, which is known to affect lateralization in both spatial and language tasks. Despite these changes to the task, we observed right-lateralized parietal activations similar to those reported in other LT studies, both at group level and in individual lateralization indices. We conclude that LT activation is robustly right-lateralized, perhaps uniquely so among commonly-studied spatial tasks. We speculate that the unique properties of the LT reside in its requirement to judge relative magnitudes of the two line segments, rather than in the more general aspects of spatial attention or visual-spatial representation.",
keywords = "Lateralization, Line bisection, Parietal lobe, Visual-spatial functions, fMRI",
author = "Anna Seydell-Greenwald and Pu, {Serena F.} and Katrina Ferrara and Chambers, {Catherine E.} and Newport, {Elissa L.} and Barbara Landau",
note = "Funding Information: This research was supported in part by an NIH CTSA Scholars Award through the Georgetown and Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (NCATS KL2 TR001432), Georgetown's “Music for the Mind” Young Investigator Award, and Georgetown's “Dean's Toulmin Pilot Award” to ASG; a T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship through NIH (5T32 HD 046388) to KF; NIH Grant K18 DC014558, American Heart Association Grant 17GRNT33650054, and the Feldstein Veron Innovation Fund to ELN; by funds to BL as a George Bergeron Visiting Scholar; by the NIH-funded DC Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (U54 HD090257); and by funds from the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University and MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital. Funding Information: This research was supported in part by an NIH CTSA Scholars Award through the Georgetown and Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (NCATS KL2 TR001432 ), Georgetown's “Music for the Mind” Young Investigator Award, and Georgetown's “Dean's Toulmin Pilot Award” to ASG; a T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship through NIH ( 5T32 HD 046388 ) to KF; NIH Grant K18 DC014558 , American Heart Association Grant 17GRNT33650054 , and the Feldstein Veron Innovation Fund to ELN; by funds to BL as a George Bergeron Visiting Scholar ; by the NIH-funded DC Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center ( U54 HD090257 ); and by funds from the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University and MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital . Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2019 Elsevier Ltd",
year = "2019",
month = apr,
doi = "10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.01.022",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "127",
pages = "57--65",
journal = "Neuropsychologia",
issn = "0028-3932",
publisher = "Elsevier Limited",
}