In
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...
, visuospatial function refers to
cognitive processes
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ima ...
necessary to "identify, integrate, and analyze space and visual form, details, structure and spatial relations" in more than one dimension.
Visuospatial skills are needed for
movement,
depth and distance perception, and
spatial navigation.
[ Impaired visuospatial skills can result in, for example, poor driving ability because distances are not judged correctly or difficulty navigating in space such as bumping into things.][
Visuospatial processing refers to the "ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize, manipulate and transform visual patterns and images".][
Early impairment in visuospatial function is found in ]dementia with Lewy bodies
Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a type of dementia characterized by changes in sleep, behavior change (individual), behavior, cognition, movement, and dysautonomia, regulation of automatic bodily functions. Unlike some other dementias, mem ...
and other conditions.[
]
See also
* Sensory nervous system
The sensory nervous system is a part of the nervous system responsible for processing sense, sensory information. A sensory system consists of sensory neurons (including the sensory receptor cells), neural pathways, and parts of the brain invol ...
* Spatial memory
In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is a form of memory responsible for the recording and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event. Sp ...
* Visual agnosia
Visual agnosia is an impairment in recognition of visually presented objects. It is not due to a deficit in vision (acuity, visual field, and scanning), language, memory, or intellect. While cortical blindness results from lesions to primary visua ...
* Visual spatial attention
* Visual system
The visual system is the physiological basis of visual perception (the ability to perception, detect and process light). The system detects, phototransduction, transduces and interprets information concerning light within the visible range to ...
References
{{reflist
Cognition
Neuropsychological assessment
Neuropsychology
Visual perception