Which side of the brain rotates a mental picture?

New study reveals that 'categorical' information is processed by the right hemisphere

2011-03-10

(Press-News.org) Milan, Italy, 9 March 2011 – Consider the simple situation in which you are walking around the kitchen and decide to pick up your own cup of tea, which is identical to others lying on the table. Your brain chooses the correct cup of tea by using different types of information that you have stored about the position of the cup in relation to the kitchen table. The information can be represented in qualitative terms (left, right, above, below) or quantitative terms (distances and angles). Previous studies have claimed that the brain's left hemisphere is critical for processing qualitative (technically 'categorical'), information and the right for quantitative ('metric') processing. However, new neuropsychological findings published in the February 2011 issue of Cortex (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00109452) show that this is not the case.

A multidisciplinary team led by cognitive neuroscientist Tim Shallice and neurosurgeon Miran Skrap working in Udine, Italy, studied the difficulties faced by 55 patients who had recently had an operation to remove a brain tumour from either the left or right side of the brain. The patients were shown a series of images of a dot inside an upright or tilted frame and were asked to reproduce its position inside an identical upright frame, a task requiring mental rotation of the image.

The team found that patients whose tumours had been in the right parietal or in the left prefrontal cortices made a considerably larger number of errors than other patients. Moreover, these two critical groups behaved rather differently from each other. The right parietal patients placed the mark in the right position with respect to a corner. However, they chose the wrong corner much more often that the other patients. The left prefrontal patients got the corner right but were otherwise highly inaccurate in their responses. It was therefore the patients with tumours of the right parietal cortex who were unable to process the categorical spatial information and perform the mental rotation. A left prefrontal tumour instead led to difficulties in the setting up of the specific program within the brain which was necessary to organize the sequence of operations required to carry out the task.

### Notes to Editors: The article is "Two qualitatively different impairments in making rotation operations" by Tania Buiatti, Alessandro Mussoni, Alessio Toraldo, Miran Skrap, and Tim Shallice, and appears in Cortex, Volume 47, Issue 2 (February 2010), published by Elsevier in Italy. Full text of the article featured above is available to members of the media upon request. Please contact the Elsevier press office, newsroom@elsevier.com. To schedule an interview, contact Professor Tim Shallice, shallice@sissa.it.

About Cortex Cortex is an international journal devoted to the study of cognition and of the relationship between the nervous system and mental processes, particularly as these are reflected in the behaviour of patients with acquired brain lesions, normal volunteers, children with typical and atypical development, and in the activation of brain regions and systems as recorded by functional neuroimaging techniques. It was founded in 1964 by Ennio De Renzi. The Editor in-chief of Cortex is Sergio Della Sala, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. Fax: 0131 6513230, e-mail: cortex@ed.ac.uk. Cortex is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00109452

About Elsevier Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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Which side of the brain rotates a mental picture?

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