Biology 306 - L12

Front 1

What is Spatial Cognition?

Back 1

What is Spatial Cognition?
Awareness of external space.
Awareness of relationship of body to external environment.
Allows us to maintain a stable representation of our external environment.
Movements made in response to external stimuli depend upon spatial cognition to convert from sensory to real-world reference frames.

Front 2

What is Attention?

Back 2

“Attention is the taking possession of the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of several simultaneous objects or trains of thought.” (William James)
Ability to focus awareness as well as sensory and cognitive processing to a restricted subset of our environment.
Selective attention is needed whenever there are multiple sources of information competing for limited processing resources

Front 3

Damage to Human Posterior Parietal Cortex produces what deficits in Spatial Cognitio?

Back 3

Optic Ataxia
Hemispatial Neglect

Front 4

Monkey Posterior Parietal Cortex (LIP):

Back 4

Visual receptive fields
Visual Activity is modulated by attention
Visual Receptive Fields can be modulated by eye position – Gain Fields.
Cells show evidence for continual remapping of Visual Space

Front 5

Monkey Ventral Intraparietal Cortex (VIP):

Back 5

Neurons have both Visual as well as Somatosensory Receptive Fields
Fields Match in Size and Location

Front 6

Frontal Cortex

Back 6

Premotor Cortex: Neurons respond to visual stimuli at specific locations relative to the head or hands

Front 7

CONCLUSIONS

Back 7

The brain maintains maps of our external environment.
To generate these maps, sensory information from a variety of systems (visual, somatosensory, auditory, olfactory) is combined to form a stable, body-centered representation of external space.
A number of cortical and sub-cortical brain structures show evidence of this process. It is likely that the integration of signals from these many brain structures is responsible for the conscious perception of our spatial relationship to the external world.
Understanding how this integration of signals takes place to form a coherent conscious percept is one of the most interesting, but formidable challenges faced by present and future neuroscientists.