BRAIN REPRESENTATION OF OBJECT-CENTERED SPACE

Object-centered spatial awareness underlies many important cognitive f unctions, including reading, which requires registering the locations of letters relative to a word, and pattern recognition, which requires registering the locations of features relative to a whole pattern. Re cent studies have elucidated the nature of the brain mechanisms underl ying this form of spatial awareness by showing that attention tends to focus on objects rather than on regions of space: by demonstrating th at each hemisphere contributes selectively to awareness of the opposit e half of object space, and by revealing that neurons in some cortical areas are selective for particular locations in object space. These r esults are concordant with the general idea that imagining or attendin g to an object is accompanied by projecting its image onto a neural ma p of object-centered space. An important aim for future studies will b e to test and extend this 'object map' hypothesis.