Test for spatial
Block Design Test: Recreate the picture
Space which hemisphere
- right hemisphere
Types of Spatial Behaviour (3)
1) Topographic Memory
2) Cognitive Maps
- Distal: lie beyond our fingertips,
- Related to topographic memory/ cog maps
3) Mental space/ time travel
Spatial Disturbances, impairments emerged (4)
- Many clinical reports of topographic disorientation following brain injury
Many different impairments can emerge:
- Not being able to draw the spatial arrangement of office, home, well-known buildings
- Some patients can draw maps, but become confused when actually trying to navigate the environment itself
- Other patients navigate routes, but can not produce maps of the successfully navigated areas
Topographic disorientation
gross disability in finding ones way about – sometimes even in previously familiar locations
Agnosia
is a rare disorder characterized by an inability to recognize and identify objects or persons
Amnesia
refers to the loss of memories, including facts, information and experiences
Lesion in posterior parietal (4)
Impairment: Egocentric disorientation
- Difficulty perceiving relative location of objects with respect to the self
- Impairments in visuospatial tasks
- Mental rotation and judging distance between objects
Lesion in Posterior cingulate (4)
Impairment: heading disorientation
- Can recognize landmarks, Relations to landmarks, and describe where they want to go
- But unable to set a course
- No “sense of direction”
Lesion in lingual gyrus (4)
Impairment: Landmark agnosia
- unable to represent appearance of prominent landmarks
Can recognize environmental features (schools, houses, shops, postoffice)
- but can’t use landmarks to guide movement
Lesion in parahippocampal gyrus (2)
Impairment: anterograde disorientation
- fine in familiar locations
- inability to learn the layout of new places
Lesion in Hippocampus (3)
Impairment: Spatial-mapping or memory deficit
- anterograde and retrograde amnesia, especially for rich spatial details
- Not having a rich and fully developed rotatable map of the space surrounding you
London Taxi Drivers & Eleanor Maguire (5)
Official London taxi drivers must train for as long as 4 years and pass stringent examinations of spatial knowledge before receiving a licence
*Using PET superimposed onto MRI structural scan
- what is the shortest legal route?
- peak activation in the right hippocampus
*Second study using structural MRI
- taxi drivers had large posterior hippocampal areas on both right and left
- controls had larger anterior hippocampal areas
- Right posterior hippocampus increased in size as a function of years spent as a taxi driver
- Suggestion is that the mental map is located in the right posterior hippocampus
Virtual Morris Water Maze (3)
Younger participants show activation in hippocampus (HC), parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) and prefrontal cortex (PFC).
Elder participants
- traversed a longer distance in locating platform
- showed reduced fMRI activation in HC and PHG.
Boundary Extension (3)
Subjects tend to remember having seen a greater expanse of a scene than was shown in a photograph.
No damage in brain: extend the boundary
Hippocampal amnesics
- don’t show boundary extension
- Scene construction theory of hippocampal function
- copy picture more accurately
Ian Water Case
Lost his body space, No propioception
- Force new link between mind and muscle
Visualise movement, can make his body perform it
- Eyes need to tell what his limbs were doing
- “Sensory substitution”
- compensates by neurooplasticity
