Scientific topics
Keywords
ITMO
Paolo Bartolomeo MD, PhD Neuroscience
Course and current status
From 1995 Consultant Neurologist, National Hospital, Saint-Maurice, France
1995-2002 Consultant Neurologist, Henri-Mondor Hospital, Créteil
1998-2006 Senior research scientist (CR1), INSERM
2003-2013 Consultant Neurologist, Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris
2003-2014 In charge of the team “Neuropsychology of focal brain lesions” , Inserm-UPMC UMRS 610
From 2014 Co-director of the PICNIC Lab (Physiological Investigations of Clinically Normal and Impaired Cognition) at the Brain and Spine Institute, inserm U 1127, Paris
From 2006 Research Director (DR2), INSERM
2006-2007 Invited professor, Faculty of Psychology, University of Granada, Spain
2007-2008 Invited professor, Faculty of Psychology, Catholic University, Milan, Italy
2008-2016 Full professor (part time), Faculty of Psychology, Catholic University, Milan, Italy
Scientific summary
To select information relevant to our goals, we orient our attention towards the objects present in our environment. Brain damage may impair these mechanisms, thus provoking a unilateral spatial neglect. About half of the patients with a lesion in the right hemisphere suffer from neglect for the left side of space. They are unaware of the left half of their environment, and have a poor functional outcome. My research has tested several proposed explanations of neglect, and shown that neither the loss of the left half of a cognitive representation of space, nor the rightward shift of an egocentric frame of reference, nor an impairment in producing arm movements toward the left can explain neglect. Instead, an association of attentional deficits seems typical of unilateral neglect. These deficits operate in a specific temporal sequence; an early attraction of attention toward the right is followed by an impairment in redirecting attention toward the left. My current research is trying to establish the precise nature of these attentional deficits, as well as their neural bases.
