To assess the consequences of this on deployment of attention to other locations, we examined participants’ discrimination of peripheral letters ( Table 1a and b). An ANOVA was conducted with four within-subjects factors: SOA (0 msec; 450 msec; 850 msec; 1650 msec); load of central task (high or low); side of peripheral stimulus (left or right) and distance of peripheral stimulus (near or far) and the between-subjects factor of group (patient or control). Results revealed significant interactions between both SOA and group [F (3, check details 7) = 10.775, p < .01],

as well as between side of peripheral letter and group [F (3, 7) = 9.627, p < .01]. Crucially there was an interaction between SOA, load, side and group [F (3, 7) = 3.611, p < .05], indicating that patients and controls were differentially affected by manipulations of SOA, the load of the task and the side of space that the letter was presented. Fig. 3b gives the data collapsed over both side and distance of letter stimuli. The control group’s letter discrimination ability whilst completing the selleck chemicals llc central task remained robust across both load conditions and all SOAs, but the patient group’s

performance was lower for the first three SOA’s (0 msec, 450 msec, 850 msec) and lower again whilst completing the more difficult central task. Presumably due to successful correction for cortical magnification factors, no comparisons involving the distance of peripheral stimuli reached significance. Therefore, for simplicity, data were collapsed across distance in further analyses. The significant effect of the factor of side in the ANOVAs above suggests differences in the perception of left versus right peripheral

stimuli. This is potentially very important and so the data were split according to side of letter presentation and re-analysed separately (Fig. 3c). For stimuli on the left, ANOVA revealed significant interactions between SOA and group [F (1, 9) = 6.705, p < .01] as well as for the crucial comparison of SOA, load and group [F (3, 7) = 4.006, p < .05]. In contrast analysis for right-sided letters revealed a main effect of SOA and group [F (1, 9) = 6.046, p < .01] but, importantly, 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase no interaction between SOA, load and group [F (3, 7) < 1]. Independent sample t-tests on the data in Fig. 3c revealed that whereas for left-sided stimuli patients and controls significantly differed in accuracy at both load levels at 0 msec [t (9) = −4.412, p < .01 and t (9) = −5.109, p < .01 for low and high respectively] and 450 msec [t (9) = −3.356, p < .05 and t (9) = −5.634, p < .01 for low and high respectively], at higher SOAs the groups’ scores were not significantly different. For right-sided stimuli, between subjects t-tests revealed that only data for 0 msec significantly differed between the groups [t (9) = 6.691, p < .01 during low load and t (9) = 6.057, p < .01 for high load].