Global processing of compound lettersin a patient with Balint's syndrome

Abstract

We report data on the ability of a patient with Balint's syndrome (GK) to process global information from compound letters. As with other patients with Balint's syndrome, GK was impaired at respond-ing to large, global letters. In Experiment 1 we show that this was due to local capture rather than the absolute size of the stimuli. Also, despite his impairment with global letters, GK showed global inter-ference on local judgements, indicating that some implicit processing took place at the global level. Interestingly, the inability to perceive large global letters was overcome when GK identified a solid, large prime letter prior to the onset of the compound figure (Experiment 2). This priming effect was temporary, and decreased as the interval between the prime and the compound letter increased (Experiment 3). When the prime was an English letter, the effect was maintained even when GK only had to identify the prime's colour, provided a colour-identification block of trials followed rather than preceded a block of trials where prime shapes had to be identified (Experiment 4). In contrast, there was no priming when GK had to identify the colour of English letter primes in a trial block following a block where the task was to identify the colour of Hebrew letter primes (Experiment 5). Overall the data indicate that local capture in Balint's syndrome can be overcome by actively priming a wide attentional window. The results can be interpreted in terms of an interaction between spatial attention and grouping processes that subserves the perception of global compound letters.

Notes

This work was supported by grants from the Medical Research Council and the Stroke Association (UK).

GK, studied here, can read an acronym presented in its normal upper-case format (e.g., IBM) but not in lower case (ibm). Individual lower-case letters are identified at least as well as upper-case letters, so the advantage for the standard format cannot be due to better processing of the parts (the individual letters), but rather reflects recognition of the familiar overall form of the acronym (see Hall et al., 2001).