The right inferior parietal lobule in spaceflight adaptation: a review of gravity-related processing mechanisms

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All legal disclaimers apply. Spaceflight alters vestibular and multisensory processing, requiring adaptation to reduced gravitational input. This review examines evidence for the involvement of the right inferior parietal lobule in altered-gravity adaptation, focusing on the supramarginal gyrus, angular gyrus, and intraparietal sulcus.

Current evidence is consistent with right parietal involvement in spatial orientation, sensory reweighting, and internal-model updating, but does not yet establish region-specific or causal mechanisms. Future multimodal studies are needed to test these proposed functions and clarify causal roles. This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Ministerial Decree No. 118 of 2 March 2023, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU (CUP: E66E23000110001).

The funder had no role in the conceptualization, writing, or decision to submit this manuscript. 1. Lab for Equilibrium Investigations and Aerospace (LEIA), University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium C. Department of Physics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy 3.

Center of Space Bio-Medicine, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy **Publisher’s note** Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. **Open Access** This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.

If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Deblieck, C., Finazzi Agrò, A., Mortaheb, S. _et al._ The right inferior parietal lobule in spaceflight adaptation: a review of gravity-related processing mechanisms. _npj Microgravity_ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41526-026-00656-3