Abstract
The mental rotation (MR) is an abstract mental operation thanks to which a person imagines rotating an object or a body part to place it in an other position. The ability to perform MR was belived to belong to the right hemisphere for objects, and to the left for one’s ownbody images. Mental rotation is considered to be basic for imitation with the anatomical perspective, which in turn is needed for social interactions and learning. Altered imitative performances have been reported in patients with resections or microstructure alterations of the corpus callosum (CC). These patients also display a reduced MR ability compared to control subjects, as shown in a recent behavioral study. The difference was statistically significant, leading us to hypothesize a role of the CC to integrate the two hemispheres’ asymmetric functions. The present study was designed to detect, by means of a functional MRI, the cortical activation evoked during an MR task in healthy control subjects and callosotomized patients. The results suggest that performing MR requires activation of opercular cortex and inferior parietal lobule in either hemispheres, and likely the integrity of the CC, thus confirming that the main brain commissure is involved in cognitive functions.
Highlights
The mental rotation (MR) is an abstract mental operation which allows a person imaging to rotate an object or a body part to lead it to a different position [1]
The results demonstrate that people with partial or total callosal resection, or with callosal alterations, such as those observed in schizophrenic patients [23,24], exhibited reduced performance in laterality tests with stimuli in third person orientation, suggesting an alteration of the MR mechanism, which could be due to a defective interhemispheric communication (Figure 1) [25]
This study aimed at defining the cortical areas activated in OBSERVE, MOVE and THINK runs in the three groups of subjects (CS, Partially Callosotomized Patients (PCP), and Totally Callosotomized Patients (TCP))
Summary
The mental rotation (MR) is an abstract mental operation which allows a person imaging to rotate an object or a body part to lead it to a different position [1]. It is a complex cognitive process rooted in real perception, through which mental representations can be recalled from memory, generated and manipulated, even in the absence of environmental input [2]. Mental rotation was indagated by measuring, in behavioral experiments, the time to make a judgment about a rotated object, which increases with the amount of rotation necessary to align an object with a referenced one, or with a previously learned template [6,7,8]. This effect has been observed with both geometric and “abstract” stimuli, and embodied and concrete stimuli [2,9,10,11]
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