Hemispheric laterality of the putamen predicts pseudoneglect

Abstract

Healthy individuals tend to exhibit a subtle leftward attentional bias, a phenomenon termed pseudoneglect. While this bias is thought to reflect a right-hemisphere dominance when allocating spatial attention, the contribution of subcortical structures remains poorly understood. Although lesion and neuroimaging studies in clinical populations have implicated asymmetries in the basal ganglia and thalamus to dysfunction in spatial attention, it remains unclear whether naturally occurring subcortical asymmetries in healthy individuals predict behavioural biases in spatial attention. In this study, we investigated whether volumetric asymmetries in subcortical structures are associated with biases in spatial attention in a non-clinical population. This was achieved by using the landmark task to assess spatial biases, alongside acquiring T1-weighted MRI data from 44 healthy participants. The subcortical regions were segmented using the FIRST algorithm to estimate the volumetric asymmetry of specific regions. We found that variability in pseudoneglect was predicted by the degree of leftward lateralisation of putamen volume, indicating that the putamen contributes to the magnitude of spatial attention biases. This also suggests that the left putamen may support right-hemisphere neocortical dominance through the indirect pathway. These findings bridge anatomical and behavioural measures, highlighting the functional relevance of subcortical asymmetry in shaping attentional processes in the healthy brain. Our findings pave the way for early diagnosis of neurological disorders associated with subcortical atrophies including Parkinsons Disease and dementia. Significance StatementHemispheric dominance in cortical networks shape attentional biases, but the role of subcortical structures remains poorly understood. Here we show that natural variability in the lateralisation of the putamen predicts individual differences in pseudoneglect--a subtle leftward bias in spatial attention observed in healthy adults. Using MRI and psychophysics, we demonstrate that greater leftward putamen asymmetry is associated with stronger leftward bias, independent of eye dominance and microsaccadic behaviour, and moderated by handedness. These findings reveal a structural subcortical basis for attentional asymmetries and suggest that simple behavioural measures could serve as non-invasive markers of early subcortical changes relevant to disorders such as Parkinsons disease, Alzheimers disease, and ADHD.