Dalrymple, K., Bischof, W. F., Cameron, D., Barton, J., and Kingstone, A. (2009). Global perception in simultanagnosia is not as simple as a game of connect-the-dots. Vision Research, 49, 1901-1908.
Simultanagnosia is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a restriction of visuospatial attention. In addition, patients are able to identify local elements of a scene, but not the global whole. This may be due to a failure to scan and assemble local elements into a global whole (i.e. connect-the-dots). We monitored the eye movements of a simultanagnosic patient while she identified local and global elements of hierarchical letters. Scanning each local element was not necessary, nor sufficient, for successful global level identification. Our results argue against a connect-the-dots strategy of global identification and suggest that residual global processing may be occurring.
Back to to publications.