Attention and action in the parietal cortex

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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?