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Spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain: evidence from healthy subjects and patients with right brain damage| old_uid | 6464 |
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| title | Spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain: evidence from healthy subjects and patients with right brain damage |
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| start_date | 2009/03/12 |
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| schedule | 16h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Although at a first glance time can be considered as a linear function, the way in which the brain builds up a mental representation of the passage of time seems a much more complex phenomenon. Our brain needs to estimate the passage of brief intervals of time with very high precision to perform extremely elaborate actions, such athletic or artistic performances. On the other hand this cognitive function is similarly crucial in everyday life, being necessary to accomplish with the most usual activities, in which we continuously keep in mind the passage of time during several seconds or minutes (i.e. making a coffee, waiting for a traffic light).
Performance of most of these activities require the integration of time with another dimension, that of space. Let us figure out a tennis player approaching a ball coming from the opposite field. He must attend to the location and to the speed of the approaching ball in order to calculate where and when to hit it. This is just an example of how goal-directed actions require directing attention to both space and time. The search of common cognitive mechanisms for these operations as well as of common brain structures to process the where and when of stimuli is therefore a hot topic in cognitive neuroscience. The topic of spatial-temporal interactions in the brain is also of general interest as the proposed relationship of perceiving space to perception of time brings the attention of both the huge number of researchers who investigate spatial processing by brains with the smaller but growing number of researchers investigating temporal processing. If we can apply some of the enormous body of knowledge concerning spatial processing to understand temporal processing, this would have a lot of implications.
Evidence on spatial-temporal interactions in the cognitive system comes from three main sources: neuropsychological findings in patients with focal brain damage; neuroimaging findings in healthy subjects performing spatial and temporal tasks; behavioural findings. Converging findings from different fields are well summarized by the theory of magnitude (Walsh, 2003), postulating common cortical metrics for representation of different quantities such as space, time and numbers. I will review separately the most significant contributions on each of these topics. |
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| oncancel | Séance initialement prévue le 11 décembre 2008 |
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| responsibles | Farnè, Béranger, Soulier |
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