Attention and action in the parietal cortex

顶叶皮层支持广泛的皮层功能，包括视觉控制和皮层意识，以及在维持对世界的有意识表征方面发挥关键作用。在这个区域有离散病变的患者中工作，最近，功能性神经成像研究已经推进了我们对顶叶皮层在控制视觉引导的手和眼运动、视觉空间注意力的方向（和重定向）以及时间表征等方面所起作用的认识。事实上，我实验室的工作表明，右顶叶皮层的损伤导致忽视（对损伤事件的意识丧失）也会导致一系列复杂的缺陷，包括空间工作记忆差，甚至对同损伤空间内的物体和事件也是如此，对中央呈现事件的时间流逝的感知显着减少。我实验室最近的功能性磁共振成像研究表明，顶叶皮层在不同的任务中有不同的参与，这些任务要求受试者根据特定的刺激配置和所需的反应来确定物体的中心。对于当前的资助期，我们的目标是跟进这项工作，以解决两个广泛的问题;首先，什么成分的缺陷是必要的，以产生对损害事件的意识丧失（即，忽视），此外，在棱镜适应期后，忽视患者的康复是什么？第二，视觉空间注意的运用与视觉引导运动的控制之间的关系是什么？

The parietal cortex subserves a wide range of cortical functions including visuomotor control and corporeal awareness, as well as playing a critical role in maintaining a conscious representation of the world. Work in patients with discrete lesions of this region and more recently, functional neuroimaging research has advanced our knowledge of the role played by the parietal cortex in such things as the control of visually guided hand and eye movements, the direction (and redirection) of visual spatial attention and in the representation of time. Indeed, work in my lab has shown that lesions to the right parietal cortex that cause neglect (a loss of awareness for contralesional events) also lead to a complex array of deficits including poor spatial working memory even for objects and events within ipsilesional space and dramatically impoverished perception of the passage of time for centrally presented events1. Recent fMRI work in my lab demonstrated that the parietal cortex is differentially involved in tasks requiring the subject to determine the centre of objects depending on particular stimulus configurations and the required response. For the current funding period we aim to follow-up on this work to address two broad questions; first, what component deficits are necessary for producing a loss of awareness for contralesional events (i.e., neglect) and in addition what is rehabilitated in patients with neglect following periods of prism adaptation? Second, what is the relationship between the deployment of visual spatial attention and the control of visually guided movements?