Bottom-up effects of sensory conflict and adaptation on mental imagery
sensorimotor grounds for high level cognition?
pp. 369-387
in: Fred Mast, Lutz Jancke (eds), Spatial processing in navigation, imagery and perception, Berlin, Springer, 2007Abstract
A large proportion of right-brain damaged patients show unilateral neglect, a neurological deficit of perception, attention, representation, and/or performing actions within their left-sided space. The intriguing symptom is a spontaneous orientation bias toward the right leading to neglect of objects or persons on the left. This ipsilesional behaviour orientation bias may also affect the representational space. This particular aspect of neglect was seen as a failure to generate or maintain a normal representation of the left side of the mental image. Affected mental images can be of spatial or numerical nature. Representational neglect represents a cognitive disorder reflecting the selective damage of structures located in the right hemisphere and involved in spatial cognition. Surprisingly, these cognitive deficits may be positively modulated by passive physiological stimulation as caloric vestibular stimulation or stimulation of sensorimotor plasticity by prism adaptation procedure. These findings suggest that using low-level sensorimotor transformation may act on higher cognitive levels of space representation and consciousness according a bottom-up track.