Interazione tra diversi codici attenzionali: spazio e semantica

The asymmetric distribution of human spatial attention has been repeatedly documented in both patients and healthy controls. Biases in the distribution of attention and/or in the mental representation of space may also affect some aspects of language processing. The present talk will be focused whether biases in attention and/or mental representation of space affect semantic representations. In particular, we investigated whether semantic judgments could be modulated by the location in space where the semantic information was presented and the role of the left and right parietal cortices in this task. Findings suggest the existence of an attentional and/or mental representational bias in semantic judgments, similar to that observed for the processing of space and numbers. Spatial manipulation of semantic material results in the activation of specialised attentional resources located in the left hemisphere.