Two Qualitatively Different Impairments in Making Rotation Operations

It is widely recognized that mental rotation is a cognitive process which engages a distributed cortical network including the frontal, premotor and parietal regions. Like other visual-spatial transformations it could require operations on both metric and categorical spatial representations. Previous reports have implicated respectively the right hemisphere being involved in the metric processing and the left hemisphere in the categorical processing. By using a modified version of the Bricolo et al.'s task (2000), we attempted to establish the cortical regions relevant for the categorical and metric aspects of mental rotation transformations. Two groups of patients were found to be impaired in our study, namely the left prefrontal and the right parietal. In particular, whereas the right parietal group made poor use of categorical information, the left prefrontal patients showed a broader mental rotation impairment with a significant number of metric errors. The results are discussed in terms of the model of Kosslyn et al. (1989) about the possible mental transformation impairments following brain lesions.