Effects of peripheral and central visual impairment on mental imagery capaci

This paper reviews a number of behavioral, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies that bea the question of whether and how visual disorders of peripheral or central origin lead to disorder mental imagery capacity. The review of the literature suggests that in cases of blindness of periph origin lack of vision can progressively lead to representational disorders. However, in patients suffe from peripheral visual deficits, representational disorders can partially or completely be compensate other sensory modalities as well as by cortical reorganization. Interestingly, in brain-damaged patie neurovisual disorders following occipital or parietal lesions are not systematically associated w representational deficits, thus demonstrating that visual perception and visual imagery may not rel the same cortical structures as previously hypothesized. Impairments seen on mental imagery t among brain-damaged patients with visual and/or spatial deficits might be due to an often co-exis attentional deficit. We discuss this possible dissociation between visual perception and visual me imagery and its implications for theoretical models of mental representation. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reser