Their 1988 paper was an attempt to determine whether a cortical area in the temporal lobe, area MT, was important for motion detection.

They did this by training monkeys on a motion detection task, then lesioning area MT and looking at how the monkeys performance declined.

A common treatment for epilepsy in the early part of this century was to sever the corpus collosum. Patients that had this surgery are known as split-brain patients.

Since information cannot pass between hemispheres, these patients can be used to determine whether the hemispheres are specialized for various tasks.

Left Hemisphere:

• Language
• Logic
• Other verbally based tasks (i.e. picture naming)

• Spatial cognition (i.e. mental rotation; spatial relationships)

Patients with a lesion in one of their parietal lobes exhibit a disorder known as hemi-spatial neglect, in which they neglect all information in one of their visual fields.

This seems to indicate that the parietal lobes are involved in attention somehow.

Patients with lesions to another area in the temporal lobe, IT, can see and copy pictures just fine, but cannot recognize the objects in the pictures.