Fractionating the binding process: neuropsychological evidence from reversed search efficiencies

The authors present neuropsychological evidence distinguishing binding between form, color, and size (cross-domain binding) and binding between form elements. They contrasted conjunctive search with difficult feature search using control participants and patients with unilateral parietal or fronto/temporal lesions. To rule out effects of task difficulty or loss of top-down guidance of search, the authors made conjunction search easier than feature search. Despite this, parietal patients were selectively impaired at detecting conjunction targets in their contralateral field. In contrast, the parietal patients performed like the other participants with form conjunctions, with form conjunctions being easier to detect than difficult feature targets. These data indicate a qualitative difference between binding in the form domain and binding across form, color, and size, consistent with theories that propose distinct binding processes in vision.