The parietal lobe is a lobe in the brain. It is positioned above (superior to) the occipital lobe and behind (posterior to) the frontal lobe.
'The parietal lobe integrates sensory information from different modalities, particularly determining spatial sense and navigation. For example, it comprises somatosensory cortex and the dorsal stream of the visual system. This enables regions of the parietal cortex to map objects perceived visually into body coordinate positions.''''Bold text'
Function
The parietal lobe plays important roles in integrating sensory information from various parts of the body, knowledge of numbers and their relations[1], and in the manipulation of objects. Portions of the parietal lobe are involved with visuospatial processing. Much less is known about this lobe than the other three in the cerebrum.
- The ventral intraparietal (VIP) area receives input from a number of senses (visual, somatosensory, auditory, and vestibular[2]). Neurons with tactile receptive fields represented space in a head-centered reference frame[2]. The cells with visual receptive fields also fire with head-centered reference frames[3] but possibly also with eye-centered coordinates[2]
See also
- ↑ Blakemore & Frith (2005). The Learning Brain. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 1-4051-2401-6
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Avillac M, Deneve S, Olivier E, Pouget A, Duhamel JR. (2005) Reference frames for representing visual and tactile locations in parietal cortex. Nat Neurosci. 8(7):941-9.
- ↑ Zhang T, Heuer HW, Britten KH. (2004) Parietal area VIP neuronal responses to heading stimuli are encoded in head-centered coordinates. Neuron 42(6):993-1001.