NEUROLOGIC & COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF CALLOSOTOMY PATIENTS

胼胝体含有超过2亿根纤维， 大脑的两个半球，并在许多方面发挥作用， 半球间整合 在接受过完整手术的患者中 胼胝体切开术，这一整合途径被切断，但这些患者 在日常生活中却不受影响 在过去，裂脑 研究已经阐明了许多偏侧化和专业化的 大脑两个半球的功能。 当前的提议是 旨在扩大这一重点研究不仅半球 专业化和半球间的整合。 提出 实验研究了知觉和认知 功能是通过胼胝体协调的。 我们假设 在基本的视觉和 注意力过程，因此这些过程不依赖于 胼胝体整合 相反，我们假设， 知觉和认知功能涉及大脑半球的专门化 并因此依赖于胼胝体途径进行整合。 值得注意的是， 在二十多年的胼胝体功能研究中， 基本假设尚未得到严格检验。 具体地说， 我们将研究可能的非胼胝体整合途径， 的形式和位置信息， 当眼球运动发生时，每个半球的视觉空间地图， 注意力分配的方式。 可能的胼胝体相互作用 知觉和记忆过程将通过研究 结合轮廓片段的视觉系统在合成 对象感知，以及事件元素在内存中的绑定 编码.

The corpus callosum contains more than 200 million fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, and plays a role in many aspects of interhemispheric integration. In patients who have undergone complete callosotomy, this integrative pathway is severed and yet these patients are remarkably unaffected in daily living. In the past, split-brain research has elucidated many of the lateralized and specialized functions of the two hemispheres of the brain. The current proposal is aimed at expanding this focus to study not only hemispheric specialization but also interhemispheric integration. Proposed experiments investigate the extent to which perceptual and cognitive functions are coordinated callosally. We hypothesize that there is duplication of function between the hemispheres in basic visual and attentional processes and therefore these processes do not rely on callosal integration. In contrast, we hypothesize that higher level perceptual and cognitive functions involve hemispheric specialization and therefore depend on callosal pathways for integration. Remarkably, in more than twenty years of research on callosal function, these fundamental hypotheses have not been rigorously tested. Specifically, we will investigate possible non-callosal pathways for the integration of form and location information across the hemispheres, the updating of each hemisphere's map of visual space when eye motions occur, and the ways in which attention is allocated. Possible callosal interactions for perceptual and memory processes will be investigated by studying the binding of contour fragments by the visual system in the synthesis of object percepts, and the binding of elements of events in memory encoding.