The World Is Visually Bound Together Until It Is Not
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1
University of California, Berkeley, United States
I will give a brief overview of previous work on what has been termed “the binding problem”, especially focusing on findings from studies with neurological patients who have visual-spatial deficits. The questions are how these deficits influence the world we see and what cognitive and neural mechanisms support perceptual experience of a bound world?
There has been a long history of investigation into how or whether spatial attention is critical for basic feature integration (e.g., colour, shape, motion, etc), a central premise of Treisman’s influential feature integration theory. The neuropsychological literature provides compelling evidence that integration is effected by spatial deficits. It also demonstrates that the binding problem can be a real problem in human perception; not simply a theoretical concept (although resistance continues to the present day). TMS evidence from several laboratories and fMRI evidence from our laboratory have supported the neuropsychological literature in suggesting the right parietal lobe, particularly the angular gyrus, as a crucial part of a frontal-parietal network involved in feature integration. I will present converging data collected from patients with Balint’s syndrome and unilateral visual neglect, TMS studies from neurologically normal populations and functional imaging data that support this claim. These studies as a whole suggest that features are coded early in the visual system and effect behaviour even when undetected, while binding occurs later in processing and is more likely to be associated with explicit, conscious perception.
Keywords:
visual spatial attention,
Neuropsychology,
fMRI,
TMS,
Perception
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Oral
Topic:
Sensation and Perception
Citation:
Robertson
LC
(2013). The World Is Visually Bound Together Until It Is Not.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00197
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Received:
15 Oct 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Lynn C Robertson, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States, lynnrob@berkeley.edu