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Do parietal cortical lesions impair spatial attention or allocentric spatial perception?

Alan Cowey1, Linda Irving-Bell

  • 1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. alan.cowey@psy.ox.ac.uk

Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior
|August 17, 2006
PubMed
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Large parietal lobe lesions in monkeys impair spatial attention, not spatial judgment. Monkeys with these lesions failed landmark tasks due to attention deficits, not an inability to process spatial relationships.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Primate Behavior

Background:

  • Parietal cortex lesions in monkeys have been linked to deficits in landmark tasks.
  • The precise nature of these deficits—whether related to spatial judgment or attention—remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether large posterior parietal cortex (LPP) lesions impair spatial attention or allocentric spatial judgment in monkeys.
  • To differentiate between attention-based and spatial judgment-based deficits in landmark task performance.

Main Methods:

  • Monkeys with lesions in different brain areas (LPP, small posterior parietal (SPP), superior temporal sulcus (STS), frontal eye field (FEF)) were tested on a landmark task with varying salience.
  • A second task required allocentric discrimination of a central spot on a plaque, adapted from human neurological patient studies.

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Main Results:

  • Only monkeys with LPP lesions showed impairment on the initial landmark task, exhibiting a failure to shift attention.
  • Monkeys with LPP lesions were unimpaired on the allocentric spatial discrimination task, even at high difficulty levels.

Conclusions:

  • Deficits in landmark tasks following parietal lesions are likely due to impaired spatial attention or object attention, not a fundamental inability to judge allocentric spatial relationships.
  • The posterior parietal cortex plays a crucial role in attention allocation during spatial tasks.