Spatial Behaviour Flashcards
What are the kinds of space?
- Spatial behaviour (guides us through space)
- Topographic memory (ability to move through space from one place to the next)
- Cognitive maps (mental representations we have of space)
- Body space (surface of the body)
- Grasping space (area around the body)
- Distal space (space the body move in and out of)
- Time space (past and future)
What role does the frontal lobe play in spatial behaviour?
- Important for spatial discriminations
- No vision to navigate environments if frontal lobe is removed
- Guiding responses on basis of stored information in absence of external cues
- Memory for location of objects
What role does the temporal cortex play in spatial behaviour?
- The hippocampus serves as a cognitive map (spatial mapping - damage results in deficits in piloting and dead reckoning)
- Hippocampus is involved in food-caching behaviour in animals (animals use distal spatial cues to find their caches, larger hippocampus in animals that cache)
- Dead reckoning (damage to hippocampus results in disruption of dead reckoning in rats - normally rats can use room cues and self-movement for guidance, can return home when all auditory and olfactory cues are removed)
- Food-storing experience - if prevented, hippocampus size lags behind
- Changes in neurogenesis (largest changes when birds are storing food)
What is the role of the parietal cortex in spatial behaviour?
- Eight visuospatial disorders result from parietal lobe damage (Balint’s syndrome - impairments in gaze direction and reaching movements)
- Spatial localization (dot location task - patients with right hemisphere lesions were impaired)
- Depth perception (dot stereograms, normal subjects and left hemisphere damage perceived normally, not right hemisphere damage)
- Parietal cortex (provides coordinate system of visual space and to locate objects in this space)
- In absence of this system, patient can still see object but cannot direct gaze or hand movements toward it
What are the differences between position, cue, and place responses?
- Position response: Navigational behaviour in which an animal uses its previous movements as a cue - that is, movements previously made to arrive at the same location
- Cue response: Navigational behaviour in which an animal locomotes to a position on the basis of its location relative to a single cue
- Place response: Navigational behaviour in which an animal locomotes to a position on the basis of its location relative to two or more cues
What are the principal deficits in spatial orientation in people?
- Egocentric disorientation
- Heading disorientation
- Landmark agnosia
- Anterograde disorientation
- Spatial learning
What is egocentric disorientation?
- Posterior parietal lobe damage
- Deficits in perceiving the relative location of objects
What is heading disorientation?
- Posterior cingulate damage
- Unable to set a course; no “sense of direction”
What is landmark agnosia?
- Lingual gyrus damage
- Unable to use prominent environmental features for orientation
What is anterograde disorientation?
- Parahippocampal gyrus lesions
- Unable to learn new representations
- Can navigate
What is a deficit in spatial learning characterized by?
- Hippocampal damage
- Deficits in spatial learning may be due to the hippocampus’ role in spatial navigation or in memory
- Right hippocampus has a special role in complex spatial abilities
What are the different types of topographic disorientation?
- Topographic disorientation
- Topographic agnosia
- Topographic amnesia
- Retrograde spatial amnesia
- Anterograde spatial amnesia
What is topographic disorientation?
-Difficulty finding your way around
What is topographic agnosia?
- Inability to identify individual landmarks
- Can recognize a building as a church, for example, but will not know it it “their” church
What is topographic amnesia?
-Inability to remember relationship between landmarks
