Attending to space within and between objects: Implications from a patient with Balint's syndrome

Neuropsychological conditions such as Balint's syndrome have shown that perceptual organization of parts into a perceptual unit can be dissociated from the ability to localize objects relative to each other. Neural mechanisms that code the spatial structure within individual objects or words may seem to be intact, while between-object structure is compromised. Here we investigate the nature of within-object spatial processing in a patient with Balint's syndrome (RM). We suggest that within-object spatial structure can be determined (a) directly by explicit spatial processing of between-part relations, mediated by the same dorsal pathway as between-object spatial relations; or (b) indirectly by the discrimination of object identities, which may involve implicit processing of between-part relations and which is probably mediated by the ventral system. When this route is ruled out, by testing discrimination of differences in part location that do not change the identity of the object, we find no evidence of explicit within-object spatial coding in a patient without functioning parietal lobes.