Vestibular integration in human cerebral cortex contributes to spatial remapping

The process of visuo-spatial updating is crucial in guiding human behaviour. While the parietal cortex has long been considered a principal candidate for performing spatial transformations, the exact underlying mechanisms are still unclear. In this study, we investigated in a patient with a right occipito-parietal lesion the ability to update the visual space during vestibularly guided saccades. To quantify the possible deficits in visual and vestibular memory processes, we studied the subject's performance in two separate memory tasks, visual (VIS) and vestibular (VES). In the VIS task, a saccade was elicited from a central fixation point to the location of a visual memorized target and in the VEST task, the saccade was elicited after whole-body rotation to the starting position thus compensating for the rotation. Finally, in an updating task (UPD), the subject had to memorize the position of a visual target then after a whole-body rotation he had to produce a saccade to the remembered visual target location in space. Our main findings was a significant hypometria in the final eye position of both VEST and UPD saccades induced during rotation to the left (contralesional) hemispace as compared to saccades induced after right (ipsilesional) rotation. Moreover, these deficits in vestibularly guided saccades correlated with deficits in vestibulo-ocular time constant, reflecting disorders in the inertial vestibular integration path. We conclude that the occipito-parietal cortex in man can provide a first stage in visuo-spatial remapping by encoding inertial head position signals during gaze orientation.