Edinburgh Psychology Keynote Talk

Speaker: Dr Paolo Bartolomeo (Sorbonne Université, Institut du Cerveau, Paris)

Title: Attention and conscious perception: converging evidence from neglect patients and intracerebral recordings

Abstract: Neuroscientific investigations into consciousness have been rapidly expanding over the past three decades. This explosion of research efforts has led to the development of several brain models of conscious experience. Curiously, however, none of these theories takes into account the functional asymmetries between the hemispheres. And yet, compelling clinical evidence from neglect patients strongly indicates that the two hemispheres do not play identical roles in conscious experience. I will explore how this evidence converges with recent findings from intracerebral recordings in drug-resistant epileptic patients, to delineate distinct roles of right and left frontoparietal networks in spatial attention and conscious reporting.

References:

• Bartolomeo, Paolo 2021. “Visual and Motor Neglect: Clinical and Neurocognitive Aspects.” Revue Neurologique 177 (6): 619–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurol.2020.09.003
• Liu, Jianghao, Dimitri J. Bayle, Alfredo Spagna, Jacobo D. Sitt, Alexia Bourgeois, Katia Lehongre, Sara Fernandez-Vidal, et al. 2023. “Fronto-Parietal Networks Shape Human Conscious Report through Attention Gain and Reorienting.” Communications Biology 6 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05108-2

Bio-sketch:

Paolo Bartolomeo is a clinical neurologist and neuroscientist with experience in cognitive and neuroimaging research on brain-damaged patients and neurotypical individuals. He leads the PICNIC Lab at the Paris Brain Institute, where he has coordinated several EU and French projects, and published more than 180 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Bartolomeo is the author of several books, including "Attention Disorders After Right Brain Damage" (Springer, 2014) and two books written for the French-speaking public, "Penser droit" (Flammarion, 2020) and "Dernières nouvelles du cerveau" (Flammarion, 2023). His team at the PICNIC Lab has discovered connectional biomarkers of stroke-induced attentional disorders, as well as a functional region in the left temporal lobe important for visual mental imagery.

Further information

For further information please contact Professor Sergio Della Sala or Professor Rob McIntosh.

The talk is open to all PPLS staff and postgraduate students as well as Psychology undergraduate students in Year 3 and 4.

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