title: Biased figure-ground assignment affects conscious object recognition in spatial neglect.
abstract: Unilateral spatial neglect is a disorder of attention and spatial representation, in which early visual processes such as figure-ground segmentation have been assumed to be largely intact. There is evidence, however, that the spatial attention bias underlying neglect can bias the segmentation of a figural region from its background. Relatively few studies have explicitly examined the effect of spatial neglect on processing the figures that result from such scene segmentation. Here, we show that a neglect patient's bias in figure-ground segmentation directly influences his conscious recognition of these figures. By varying the relative salience of figural and background regions in static, two-dimensional displays, we show that competition between elements in such displays can modulate a neglect patient's ability to recognise parsed figures in a scene. The findings provide insight into the interaction between scene segmentation, explicit object recognition, and attention.
authors.affiliation: a University of Queensland , St Lucia , Australia.
authors.forename: Ranmalee
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Eramudugolla
authors.forename: Jon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Driver
authors.forename: Jason B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Mattingley