Personal, Peripersonal, and Extrapersonal Space

Abstract

In the process of acquiring information about the world, the sense organs are not passive receptacles of energy information. Instead, the sensory systems have been found to actively probe and search the extrapersonal space to update the internal representations of the world and the contents of emotional and cognitive schema. Gitelman et al. note that perturbations in this process, usually resulting from right hemisphere lesions, lead to the syndrome of left hemispatial neglect. Left hemispatial neglect has been most frequently associated with lesion sites involving the parietal and premotor cortices and, less frequently, the cingulate region, the thalamus, or the basal ganglia of the right hemisphere. These regions are interconnected with each other and collectively give rise to a large-scale neural network subserving numerous facets of spatial attention.