The researchers found out that brain activity patterns in the parietal lobe encode egocentric, i. e. the relative position of the neighborhood for subjects. The spatial information found there proved to be independent of each object from its position in space and from the absolute position of the subject. It had, therefore, be egocentric direction information in three-dimensional environment.
This result turns out to be particularly interesting as brain damage in the parietal cortex can lead to serious disruptions of egocentric spatial perception.
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