COGNITIVE

PSYCHOLOGY

23, 299-330 (191)

Neuropsychological
Contributions to Theories of
Part/Whole Organization
LYNN

C.

RoBERTsoN*,t

AND

MARVIN

R.

LAMBt

Veterans Administration Medical Center and University of California, Davis, School of

Medicine, Departments of *Neurology and fpsychiatry
Recent evidence from neuropsychology has proven useful in defining neural
and cognitive subsystems involved in certain cognitive processes such as spatial
attention (Posner, Walker, Friedrich, & Rafal, 1984) and imagery (Farah, 1988;
Kosslyn, 1986). In this article we discuss neuropsychological evidence that suggests a modular system is responsible for the organization of parts and wholes by
the visual system. We review both normal and neuropsychological evidence that
suggest that hierarchical organization of objects within objects involves the coordination of at least four separate subsystems, one that emphasizes the global
properties of a figure (association with right posterior superior temporal-parietal
regions), one that emphasizes the local properties of a figure (associated with left
posterior superior temporal-parietal regions), one that controls the distribution of
attentional resources to these subsystems (associated with right or left lateral
parietal lobe), and one that interconnects global and local properties and relies on
the integrity of posterior temporal-temporal pathways. 8 1991 Academic press, IX

INTRODUCTION

To the normal observer objects in the world not only appear organized
but they appear organized in particular ways. One way is hierarchically.
There are objects that are distinct yet embedded within other objects. A
room might contain desks, filing cabinets, and desk drawers, but the desk
contains desk drawers and not rooms or filing cabinets. Parts such as
drawers do not lose their object status by integration, as parts such as the
four lines and angles of a square seem to do. Rather, parts that are objects
remain objects. They are simply lower level objects nested within higher
level objects.
Given this kind of perceived organization, it is reasonable to suspect
that there are mechanisms that operate to connect objects hierarchically
Requests for reprints should be addressed to Lynn C. Robertson, Research Service 151,
Veterans Administration Medical Center, 150 Muir Road, Martinez, CA 94553. Portions of
this paper were presented at the 29th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago
(November 1988).
The preparation of this manuscript was supported by the Research Service of the Veterans Administration, by NIAAA Grant AA06637 to the first author, and by NINDS Grant
NS27902 to the second author. We wish to thank Martha Farah, Michael Kubovy, Robert
Kinchla, and David Navon for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
299
OOlO-0285/91 $7.50
Copyright
0 1991 by Academic Press, Inc.
All rights of reproduction
in any form reserved.

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and yet keep those same objects perceptually separate. It would thus
appear that one task of the perceptual organizing system is to discriminate
objects but at the same time to interconnect them. Together, neuropsychological and cognitive psychological investigations have begun to reveal several subsystems that are involved in hierarchically
organizing
objects, subsystems that may eventually help us to more fully understand
the neural and cognitive mechanisms that manage this task.
In this paper we will propose that there is a modular but interconnected
system underlying the perceived hierarchical organization of objects. Our
discussion will center on neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in
perceptually organizing objects into structures with whole objects containing other whole objects as parts. We will not discuss theories of object
perception, object constancy, or pattern recognition nor will we discuss
such issues as how objects are perceived when occluded or transformed
(e.g., misoriented). We have only just begun to understand how the brain
manages the hierarchical organization of the world, but what we have
found has pointed to some important cognitive subsystems that were
missed or ignored by studies that focused only on normals or only on
brain mechanisms. Bringing these areas of study together has resulted in
a much more unified model that can address several of the main questions
that have been unresolved on the basis of studies with normals alone.
There has been a long history of enquiry in psychology concerning how
parts and wholes are related beginning with the Gestalt psychologists who
argued that wholes were not simple additions of their parts (Koffka,
1935). There has also been a long history in neuropsychology addressing
the question of how parts and wholes are processed by the human brain.
Neuropsychological
studies of part-whole relationships were most active
in the study of hemisphere laterality. This began with the observation that
people with left hemisphere damage are more likely to respond poorly to
the parts or details of a visual scene, while people with right hemisphere
damage are more likely to respond poorly to the whole, configuration, or
Gestalt. This asymmetry in performance led to many theories of functional hemisphere asymmetry, most noticeably that the left hemisphere
functioned analytically and the right hemisphere holistically (for a recent
argument for this position see Bradshaw and Nettleton, 1981), but these
theories were not very specific about how the brain organized or related
parts and wholes. Nevertheless, observations from the study of hemisphere laterality were important in building the foundation for more recent neuropsychological
studies into perceptual organization, and some
of these will provide the cornerstone for our discussion. However, we will
go beyond issues of hemisphere functional asymmetry and show that
posterior regions of the human brain form an interconnected network of

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subsystems that are involved in the organization of objects into hierarchical structures.
There are four basic questions in the study of normal hierarchical organization that have dominated the contemporary
scene, and we will
discuss each in turn in sections that follow. First, what is processed first,
features of parts (more local forms) or features of their wholes (more
global forms)? Second, to what degree can known properties of the visual
sensory system account for the perceptual organization of parts and their
wholes? Third, to what degree can differences in performance between
parts and their wholes be attributed to attentional versus perceptual processes? Fourth, what determines the interaction between parts and their
wholes that eventually produces a coherent perceptual scene? One benefit of the neuropsychological
investigation of cognition is that it not only
helps isolate functional cognitive systems but also provides some indication of the neural systems involved, and we will discuss these neural
systems as well.
Some have argued that it is difficult or impossible to discover facts
regarding normal functioning based on data from brain-injured subjects
because cognitive and/or neurological reorganization can occur in such
subjects. Thus, we will develop our ideas by contrasting and comparing
the findings derived from studies of normals and those from studies of
subjects with brain lesions. These literatures must compliment
one another and not be antagonistic if brain reorganization is to be dismissed as
the determinant
of modularity
inferred by the brain-injured
patient.
Neuropsychological
data need not constrain models of cognition, but they
can extend and compliment such models, and we will demonstrate that
this has been the case for the study of hierarchical organization of visual
patterns.
WHAT IS PROCESSED FIRST?
It has often been argued that wholes are built up from their constituent
parts, yet there is a great deal of evidence that perception does not always
work this way (Banks & Printzmetal, 1976; Kotlka, 1935; Navon, 1977).
The evidence has led to a long and unresolved controversy over what gets
processed first, parts or their wholes. In this section we will give an
overview of this debate and conclude that both get processed first but in
different regions of the human brain. There are different subsystems that
scale the upper and lower limits of what will be perceived as the largest
whole object and the smallest whole object. One subsystem emphasizes
local level objects more than global level objects in a visual pattern and
one emphasizes global level objects more than local.
Some of the early examples of the whole dominating its parts were

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observed by the Gestalt psychologists and resulted in their declaration

that the whole is different from the sum of its parts (Koffka, 1935). Perception (as well as conception) of wholes and parts was different, and
wholes could qualitatively change how the parts were perceived. Properties such as proximity, similarity, symmetry, etc., could all change the
perception of an element in a visual display. In the information processing
era the question has become what is processed first, the whole or its
parts? (see Robertson, 1986).
As early as 1938 Krechevsky suggested that perceptual organization
began with a homogeneous
organization of the visual field only progressing to differentiation
if the initial organization was not sufficient
to perform the task. He developed this model from observations in rats,
but in 1953 he extended it to humans (Krech & Calvin, 1953) arguing
for the existence
of a hierarchical
order of levels of perceptual
organization.
His model was based on data showing increased differentiation in reproducing visual stimuli over trials.
Over 20 years later Navon (1977) echoed Krechevsky by proposing a
model of global precedence in which the visual system processed global information before local all else being equal (Navon, 1981). Using
stimulus patterns with local letters hierarchically nested within a global
letter (see Fig. l), Navon found that reaction time was faster for global
than for local letters, and when the identity of the global and local letters
differed (inconsistent condition) response time was further slowed in responding to the local letters (global interference) but not vice versa (no
local interference). The relevant data from Navon are replotted in Fig. 2.
These effects occurred even though subjects were directed to respond
only to the global or only to the local letters in isolated blocks of trials. In
other words, subjects could not skip global analysis even when it was
irrelevant for the task and this inability was reflected in two effects-an
overall advantage in responding to the global level and a slowing of a
response to the local level when patterns at the two levels were incon-

HHHH
H
HHHH
H
HHHH
FIG. 1. Example of a hierarchical figure with a global H composed of local Ss.

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ORGANIZATION

700 0
650 -3
3

600~-

0-0

Locally

A-A

Globally

Oirected
Directed

.g
I-

550~-

.G
Ti
0:z

soo-A-------.
450~400 _
Consistent

inconsistent

2. Navons (1977) findings for globally directed and locally directed conditions when
the letters at the two levels were consistent and when they were inconsistent. There was a
global advantage in reaction time and global interference.
FIG.

(global interference). Because focused attention procedures could

not overcome the global advantage nor the global interference, global
precedence was hypothesized as a perceptual effect and not due to attention being directed to global or local information as a function of the task
demands. The original model was based on a single mechanism that processed global before local information.
That is, local information
was
slowed because resources were first engaged in global processing. Later
Navon (1981) discussed alternative explanations to this idea. For instance, there could be two channels of processing, one responding to
global information at a faster rate than one responding to local information. Each channel only responded to one level or the other, but because
the global channel operated at a faster rate global precedence was still
hypothesized.
As Navon (1981) has noted, global precedence was never meant as an
all inclusive theory. It was understood that there would be limits that
depended on such things as overall size, acuity, luminance differences,
and so forth. However, not everyone has found a global advantage even
when using patterns and tasks similar to Navons. This predictably led to
great debate over the theory of global precedence with subsequent studies
focusing on what produced the global advantage in Navons subjects and
under what conditions this advantage could be changed (Boer & Keuss,
1982; Hoffman, 1980; Hughes, Layton, Baird, & Lester, 1984; Kimchi &
Palmer, 1982; Kinchla 62 Wolfe, 1979; Martin,
1979a; Miller,
1981;
Palmer, 1983; Pomerantz, 1981, 1983). The upshot of this debate was that
various factors could change global precedence, many of which were
sistent

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fairly obvious (e.g., visual angle, retinal location, size ratio) and others
that were not as obvious (e.g., spatial uncertainty, stimulus-response
compatibility,
stimulus duration above threshold, familiarity).
More recently, neuropsychological
evidence has shown that damage to
specific regions of the brain can also affect global advantage in interesting
and unexpected ways. Patient groups with lesions centered in certain
regions of the human brain (specifically left posterior superior temporal
gyrus and adjacent parietal lobe) respond to global information before
local (i.e., they are worse at local), while patients with lesions centered in
analogous regions of the right hemisphere respond to local information
before global (i.e., they are worse at global), all else being equal. This
pattern occurs under conditions of normal visual acuity and suggests that
two separate subsystems are involved in responding to the most global
and most local forms of a stimulus display. One subsystem performs
global analysis more rapidly and is associated with right hemisphere functioning while another performs local analysis more rapidly and is associated with left hemisphere functioning.
It is reasonable to believe that
these systems do not respond exclusively to one level or the other. They
simply weight global and local information differently. Right hemisphere
damage does not preclude a correct response to a global target while the
stimulus is on the screen, it simply slows reaction time to global targets
relative to local. The same holds for left hemisphere damage except that
reaction time is slowed to local targets relative to global targets. Gross
errors can be found in the expected direction in other types of experiments, but this has been reported only under acute stages or with very
large lesions encompassing several neural regions (Delis, Robertson, &
Efron, 1986).
Clinical evidence has long pointed to a difference between left and right
hemisphere-damaged
patients in responding to global and local levels of a
visually presented stimulus (although the difference has not always been
described as such). This difference is obvious upon clinical evaluation
when patients with certain lesions involving the left hemisphere are asked
to draw a pattern from memory such as the Rey Osterreith pattern shown
in Fig. 3a. Such a person is likely to produce a drawing such as that shown
in Fig. 3b, where more of the outer or global portions of the figure are
drawn and more local parts are missed, while a person with a similar right
hemisphere lesion is more likely to produce a drawing such as shown in
Fii. 3c where more inner or local portions are drawn but misplaced. These
drawings are only examples but they are also consistent with performance
of right and left hemisphere-damaged
patients on a standardized Block
Design task where subjects have to configure a number of isolated blocks
into a standard pattern. Right hemisphere-damaged
patients are more
likely to break the overall configuration, while left hemisphere-damaged

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C
Q
%
Db%

FIG. 3. The Rey Osterreith figure used in clinical evaluation (a), a drawing of the figure
from memory by a person with left hemisphere injury (b), and a drawing of the figure from
memory by a person with right hemisphere injury (c).

patients are more likely to have difficulty placing the individual blocks in
their correct orientation or position (Kaplan, 1976).
Experimental evidence supports the idea that these alterations in performance on clinical tests are likely due to the global and local structure
inherent in such tests. When we asked hospitalized patients with left or
right hemisphere lesions to draw Navon-type patterns from memory using
the same procedure as used clinically with the Rey Osterreith pattern,
those with left hemisphere lesions were more likely to miss local letters
and geometric patterns, while those with right hemisphere lesions were
more likely to miss global letters and geometric patterns (Delis et al.,
1986). Examples of patient drawings are shown in Fig. 4. The dissociation
found when patients drew figures from memory was also present in a four
alternative forced choice procedure where subjects only had to point to
one of four patterns that had been presented earlier. Subjects with left
TARGET

STIMULUS

RIGHT

CVA

LEFT

FIG. 4. Drawings of targets from memory for right hemisphere-damaged

hemisphere-damaged patients.

CVA

patients and left

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hemisphere lesions were more likely to choose a distractor that was locally different from the correct choice (i.e., a local error), and subjects
with right hemisphere lesions were more likely to choose a distractor that
was globally different (i.e., a global error). These results ruled out a motor
explanation for the dissociation and were consistent with clinical observation. Some of these same subjects also participated in a second experiment using Palmers triangle task in which equilateral
triangles are
aligned in different orientations and the subject is to report the direction
the triangle appears to point (Palmer, 1980; Robertson & Delis, 1986).
Again, the patients performance was consistent with their recognition
and recall performance. The global alignment inlluenced right hemisphere-damaged
patients less than controls, while left hemispheredamaged patients were more influenced by the global alignment than
controls. These findings were the first indication that the global/local by
hemisphere dissociation might be present in the early stages of analysis,
as these effects occurred while the stimuli were present in contrast to the
previous memory paradigms.
None of these studies included timing measures so the issue of precedence could not be addressed directly. Although we knew that one level
was remembered better or was more influential
than the other depending on which hemisphere was involved, we did not yet know the relationship between these effects and global or local precedence, and this was
critical if we were to relate the neuropsychological
findings to the issue of
precedence in normals.
We thus changed to a reaction time paradigm and used high functioning
individuals who were at least 1 year postinjury to reduce the contribution
of acute effects such as edema and confusion. Radiological and electrophysiological evidence of a unilateral, focal lesion in posterior regions
was used to select subjects, since these areas had been most implicated in
visual spatial deficits (see De Renzi, 1982). (A full description of patient
selection and screening can be found in the study by Robertson, Lamb, 8z
Knight, 1988.) In three separate experiments we presented Navon-type
stimuli and found the global/local by hemisphere dissociation in reaction
time in the expected direction (right hemisphere lesions affected global
response times more than local relative to controls and left hemisphere
lesions affected local response times more than global relative to controls)
(Lamb, Robertson, & Knight, 1990; Lamb et al., 1989; Robertson et al.,
1988).
The hemisphere dissociation between responding to global and local
levels was evident in reaction time tasks in patients with posterior damage
even one or more years post injury. The use of reaction time with high
functioning patients is very important because we did not find abnormal
performance in Palmers triangle task in these subjects as we did with

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subjects in the acute stages. Patients in the reaction time studies had small
lesions and were well post onset, and it is not surprising that they were
able to perform similar to normals on tasks that differentiated normals
from patients with larger lesions only a few weeks post onset. There
appears to be a continuum of recovery, and more sensitive measures are
needed with patients with small lesions well postinjury in order to observe
any differences between normal and patient groups.
What relevance do these findings have for the way normal perceptual
organization of hierarchically
structured patterns operates? First, we
have shown that depending on the side of the lesion, perception can break
down to produce a global or a local advantage. There appear to be two
different cognitive mechanisms in responding to the two levels of hierarchical structure, one that is more sensitive to the more global levels of
structure and one more sensitive to the more local levels. One of the
questions this raises is what type of information at each level is being
processed by these separate mechanisms?
One answer is that the two hemispheres respond differently to spatial
frequencies that differentiate global and local levels (Sergent, 1982). If
this is true, then our results implicate the posterior superior temporalparietal areas in this analysis because neither more caudal lateral parietal
nor frontal damage produce such dissociations (Robertson et al., 1988;
Robertson, Lamb, & Knight, submitted for publication). At first glance,
it seems rather bold to relate global and local levels of structure to different spatial frequencies, but in fact there is quite good evidence supporting such a link. Using an adaptation procedure, Shulman, Sullivan,
Gish, & Sakoda (1986) adapted subjects to sine wave gratings of different
spatial frequencies and then had them identify target letters at the local or
global level of a stimulus like that used by Navon. They found that the
adapting frequency that most affected performance with global targets
was lower than the adapting frequency that most affected performance
with local targets. In a separate study Schulman and Wilson (1987) asked
subjects to identify letters at either the local or global level in separate
blocks of trials and thus to focus attention on one level or the other. On
This was also emphasized by a study performed by Ziyah Mehta, Freda Newcombe, and
one of us (L.R.) where no dissociation was found in a group of highly functional British war
veterans decades postinsult on the recognition and triangles task we had used in acute
patients. However, we did not test the British subjects using reaction time measures and
cannot say for sure whether they would have shown differences in speed of response to
global and local targets. Our data from chronic patients strongly suggest they would. This
configuration of results only confirms that sensitive measures are necessary to detect dysfunction when patients are well past the acute stage and are functioning well enough to
perform tasks such as driving a car and working in the community as many of our subjects
were able to do.

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a number of probe trials, subjects were also asked to detect sine wave
gratings of different spatial frequencies. Low frequency gratings were
more easily detected than high frequency gratings when subjects were
globally directed, while the reverse was true when they were locally
directed. These findings not only demonstrate a systematic link between
attention to frequency and attention to level but also suggest that attention may be able to modulate perceptual organization in early stages of
spatial frequency analysis.
Shulman and his colleagues used central presentation and normal college age students, so we do not know to what extent these results can
explain the differences in performance between right and left hemispheredamaged patients. However, from studies reported by Sergent (1982) we
do know that presenting hierarchical patterns in the right or left visual
field of normals produces results consistent with our findings in braininjured patients. A right visual field (left hemisphere) advantage results
when responding to local targets of Navon-type patterns and a left visual
field (right hemisphere) advantage in responding to global targets.2 In fact,
it was on the basis of these visual field performance asymmetries that
Sergent first suggested that lower spatial frequencies were better represented in the right hemisphere and higher spatial frequencies in the left
hemisphere. Sergent did not predict that this should necessarily result in
a difference in contrast sensitivity detection in the two visual fields (and
in fact this does not occur if gratings are presented without adaptation or
attentional manipulations;
Kitterle 8z Kaye, 1985), but rather that the
effect occurs in a subsequent stage of processing that is sensitive to the
output of these channels (Sergent, 1987).
More direct evidence for this hypothesis has been recently collected by
Kitterle and Christman (in press). They asked normal subjects to respond
to sinusoidal gratings of one (low spatial frequency) and nine (high spatial

2 It should be noted that not everyone has found a left visual field advantage to global
targets when using stimuli similar to Navons (Alivisates & Wilding, 1982; Boles, 1984).
However, the means in Boles study were in the appropriate direction but did not reach
significance. We too found a trend toward a left visual field advantage in processing global
information in a task that was not designed to test hemispheric lateralization per se but did
use right and let? field presentation (Lamb &Robertson, 1988, Experiment 3). Alivisates and
Wilding, Boles, and we had not had as strict a subject screening protocol as Sergent. We
know of no study reporting a right visual field advantage or even a trend in this direction in
responding to global information or a left field advantage when responding to local. Furthermore, Sergents visual field differences were also apparent in a study reported by Martin
(1979b). Finally, it is not always clear when a visual field advantage is due to hemispheric
functions that are associated with the direct input from the contralateral visual field and
when it is due to biases associated with the internal representation of space (Robertson &
Lamb, 1988; Robertson & Lamb, 1989).

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frequency) cycles per degree (c/deg) presented in the right or left visual
field. They found no visual field differences in contrast sensitivity or
response time when subjects were asked to detect the presence or absence of a grating independent of its frequency. However, when subjects
were asked to determine which pattern was presented, the predicted interaction between visual field presentation and spatial frequency did occur. A right visual field advantage in reaction time was found for the
higher spatial frequency gratings and a left visual field advantage for the
lower spatial frequency gratings. These data support the claim that low
spatial frequencies are processed more efficiently by the right hemisphere
and higher spatial frequencies by the left hemisphere as long as discriminating which frequency is presented is required. Higher order processes
than simple detection must be employed before evidence for functional
hemispheric differences in spatial frequency analysis are observed. In
turn, Kitterle & Christmans data suggest that elementary visual responses to different spatial frequencies in striate cortex are not asymmetrically represented, but that a subsequent process is. This would predict
that damage to cortical regions that are strongly connected to striate
cortex but beyond it would reveal asymmetries in visual function, and
although we have not yet presented sinusoidal gratings to our patients the
asymmetries are clear in the STG groups in responding to levels of structure with different spatial frequency components. In this regard, it is also
important to note that evidence from animal literature has revealed strong
connections between area MT and surrounding STG regions in monkey
(Desimone & Ungerleider, 1986; Ungerleider & Desimone, 1986), and MT
receives direct projections from visual striate cortex (see Maunsell &
Newsome, 1987).
Other studies in normals and in patients using less direct manipulations
of spatial frequency have also supported the spatial frequency by hemisphere hypothesis. For instance, a right visual field advantage that is
found when subjects respond to pairs of letters at 2.5 eccentricity will
change to a left visual field advantage as the visual angle between fovea1
fixation and the letters increases to 11 (Sergent, 1983a). It is known that
cortical cells that respond to high spatial frequencies are absent beyond
about 5 (Tootell, Silverman, 8z DeValois, 1981), and the switch in visual
field from right to left is not found below 4 (Sergent, 1983b). In addition,
blurring an object, a procedure that affects high spatial frequencies more
than low, changes response patterns to stimuli presented in the right
visual field more than the left visual field (Jonsson & Hellige, 1986).
Furthermore, Sergent (1985) found that low pass filtering of faces changed
a right visual field advantage to a left visual field advantage. More recent
evidence reported by Wolcott, Saul, Hellige, and Kumar (1987) has also
shown that blurring letters affects right more than left hemisphere-

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damaged stroke patients. When the left hemisphere is intact but not the
right and the stimulus contains mainly low spatial frequencies performance is disrupted.
Although we were originally skeptical of the relationship between global and local levels and different spatial frequencies (Delis et al., 1986), the
combined evidence from adaptation and attentional manipulations
in normals, visual half field studies in normals, and findings in the patient groups
makes the connection between the globalilocal
levels and spatial frequency analysis more compelling. The global/local by hemisphere dissociation seen in patient groups with unilateral posterior temporal lesions
may be linked to an analysis of the relative spatial frequencies at the two
levels of the stimulus. Although this hypothesis is in need of direct support, the converging evidence is strongly in its favor.
SENSORY PROCESSES AND GLOBAULOCAL
ADVANTAGE
It is obvious that the visual sensory system plays a crucial role in
determining the quality of the information that subsequent operations can
utilize in processing a visual scene. Sensory registration of the most local
level of a visual stimulus will be more difficult when stimuli are presented
in the periphery than when they are presented foveally simply because the
local level is smaller so cannot be as readily seen.
In a pivotal paper published in 1983, Pomerantz argued that sensory
factors might explain the global reaction time advantage in Navons original studies, and that the global advantage might reflect little more than
the advantage that would be observed with any two stimuli that differed
in discriminability.
Pomerantz pointed out that Navon found a global
reaction time advantage whether the letters at the global and local level
had the same identity (consistent conditions) or not (inconsistent condition). That is, global and local targets produced reaction time differences
even in baseline conditions where no interference would be expected.
Thus, the two levels could simply differ in discriminability.
Both Pomerantz (1983) and Ward (1982) reported evidence indicating that global precedence seemed only to occur under conditions of lowered visual acuity
making it easier to discriminate the global than the local targets. Although
lowered visual acuity certainly must effect the rate of visual processing,
later studies demonstrated that the lack of a global advantage in central
presentation was due to the spatial certainty of the central pattern in these
studies (Lamb & Robertson, 1988).
Other variables found to change a global advantage to a local advantage
produced results consistent with the discriminability
explanation.
For
instance, Hoffman (1980) found that distorting local features produced
faster reaction times to global forms and distorting global features produced faster reaction times to local forms. Other parameters such as size

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ratio (Kimchi & Palmer, 1982), local density (Martin, 1979a), and overall
visual angle (Kin&la dz Wolfe, 1979) could also change a global advantage
to a local one. As a result of effects like these many investigators became
fairly disenchanted with the theory of global precedence.
However, even in normals there are several experiments supporting
global precedence that cannot be explained by differences in discriminability, at least at any simple level of what is meant by discriminability
such
as acuity. For instance, Ward (1982, Experiment 3) found global but not
local interference in Navon-type stimuli even when baseline reaction time
to global and local levels was equal (presumably reflecting equal discriminability) as did Hughes et al. (1984) using a different type of stimulus
pattern but with global/local organization. Ghim and Eimas (1988) also
found global precedence in infants while controlling for discriminability
in
baseline measures. In addition, a global advantage equal in magnitude to
Navons can be found with central presentation where local acuity is
maximal even when presenting patterns at visual angles similar to those
that Navon used (Kinchla & Wolfe, 1979; Miller, 1981; Navon & Norman,
1983; Robertson & Palmer, 1983). Thus it is clear that discrimination
as an
explanation is vacuous if the mechanism that makes one level more discriminable than another is unknown. Pomerantzs argument that Navons
theory of global precedence was not a principle of the perceptual organizing system is well taken if the effects can be explained by some peripheral sensory effect such as differential acuity, saturation, or lateral
masking. However, no theory of peripheral vision that we know can
account for all the data even if only data from normal subjects are considered (see Lamb & Robertson, 1988, 1989, for evidence that supports
this claim).
Together these studies demonstrate that a global advantage need not
reflect discriminability
differences that are due to some peripheral sensory process such as visual acuity, brightness, lateral masking, etc. (Pomerantz, 1983; Grice, Canham, & Boroughs, 1983). We are not saying
that these processes should not be considered when designing experiments and interpreting data because they obviously play an important role
in determining the quality of information passed to the cortex from the
visual sensory system. Rather, we are arguing that they are very unlikely
candidates in accounting for differences in performance occurring with
hierarchically organized patterns in most cases. As we have already discussed, there are central processes that play a major, if not primary, role
in producing a global or local advantage. As we will see in the next
section, many investigators who have collected data exclusively with
normals have argued that the central processes that affect global and local
analysis are attentional ones. We will also show that the combined data
from normals and brain-injured patients point to a system where global or

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local advantage reflects both attentional and perceptual processes that are
well beyond the sensory levels and can be affected by lesions to different
cortical regions beyond primary visual cortex.
ATTENTIONAL

VERSUS

PERCEPTUAL

CONTRIBUTIONS

There are several studies using normals that have shown attentional
manipulations
can affect a global or local advantage. This fact suggests
that one possible explanation for the global/local dissociation observed in
right and left brain-injured patients might be due to some lateralized attentional mechanism rather than some lateralized perceptual encoding of
information at global and local levels. If this were the case, it would still
support a dual subsystem model but one based on attentional asymmetries and not on perceptual operations per se. The normal distribution of
attention to global and local levels may have been disrupted in different
ways by unilateral left or right lesions. We will see that both attentional
processes and perceptual processes contribute to global/local analysis and
can be affected independently
by damage to different cortical areas in
humans.
Several experiments have shown that attentional manipulations
can
change performance advantage for global or local information (Kinchla,
Solis-Macias, & Hoffman, 1983; Lamb & Robertson, 1987; Miller, 1981;
Paquet & Marikle, 1988; Pomerantz & Sager, 1975; Robertson et al., 1988;
Ward, 1982). For instance, Kinchla et al. (1983) found that when targets
were more likely to appear at the global than at the local level the detection of global targets increased, while the detection of local targets decreased. Conversely, when targets were more likely to occur at the local
than the global level, detection of local targets improved while detection
of global targets got worse. The same effects also occurred when subjects
were simply told that one level was more important
than the other
without changing the probability schedules. The investigators argued that
the inverse relationship between local and global response was due to
attentional allocation between these two levels.
We addressed the question of an attentional role for global/local performance changes in patients by using reaction time measures and, like
Kinchla et al. (1983), varied the probability that a target would appear at
the global or local level in different blocks of trials (Robertson et al.,
1988). In one block of trials the probability of a local target p(L) was .25,
in another it was 5, and in a third it was .75. The rationale was the same
as Kinchla et al. If a target was more likely to occur at the local level [p(L)
= .75], then reaction time should be faster for local targets and slower for
global targets compared to a baseline condition where targets were
equally likely to occur at the two levels [p(L) = .5]. The opposite would
be expected when global targets were more likely to occur at the global

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313

level [p(L) = .25]. Subjects were normal controls and patients with left
hemisphere lesions centered in the posterior superior temporal gyrus and
adjacent parietal lobe (LSTG) or the caudal lateral parietal lobe (LIPL)
and patients with right temporal-parietal
lesions encompassing both STG
and IPL (RTP). There were fewer patients with right hemisphere damage,
and their lesions tended to be more heterogeneous in this study than in
subsequent studies we will discuss. As a result, these subjects could not
be separated into temporal and parietal groups here. However, all patients with right hemisphere damage had posterior unilateral lesions in
temporal-parietal
regions (see Robertson et al., 1988, for lesion reconstruction and rationale). The major findings are shown in Fig. 5A. Reaction time to respond to local and global targets is plotted for each group
for each probability schedule, p(L) = .25, p(L) = 5, and p(L) = .75.
The findings in the control group were similar to those found by
Kin&la et al. (1983). When global targets were more likely [p(L) = .25],
reaction time favored the global level and reduced reaction time to the
local level, whereas the reverse was true when local targets were more
likely [p(L) = .75]. Given the similarity of the data to Kinchla et al., we
assume that the same mechanism is responsible for the cost/benefit tradeoff in the two studies, and these findings are consistent with an attentional
model with limited resources allocated to different levels of pattern structure. Significant benefits and costs relative to the neutral condition were
observed as a function of changes in the target level probability schedules. In addition, although the mean reaction time for controls appears to
be faster for local targets in the p(L) = .5 condition, this effect was not
significant. Thus, the global and local targets were about equally discriminable in normals.
If patients reallocated attention normally, then the normal cost/benefit
tradeoff should be evident even if a baseline response favored one level or
the other. However, if control over attentional distribution
were impaired, then the cost/benefit tradeoff should be reduced or absent. The
results for patients with left hemisphere damage demonstrated that both
effects could occur, but one was associated with LIPL involvement and
the other with LSTG involvement. As can be seen in Fig. 5A, the LIPL
group showed no significant cost/benefit tradeoff but equal p(L) = .5
baseline reaction times to global and local targets. The cost/benefit tradeoff was reliably reduced for the LIPL group compared to controls suggesting a deficit in allocating attentional resources. In contrast, the LSTG
group showed a normal cost/benefit tradeoff, although there was a baseline global advantage. This global advantage was opposite that for the
patients with right temporal parietal (RTP) damage.
These baseline asymmetries between right and left hemisphere groups
were consistent with our earlier observations of a global/local by hemi-

314

ROBERTSON

o-OP(L)=.25
A-AP(L
l -P(L)-.5

A
A

AND LAMB

1300

LIPL

Ctl

LSTG

RTP

500 1
L

Target
LIPL

Level
LSTG

RTP

Target
Level
5. (A) Robertson, Lamb, and Knights (1988) reaction time findings for patients with
lesions centered in the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG), left inferior parietal lobe
(LIPL), or right posterior temporal regions (RTP) and controls (CTL) for conditions with a
high probability of a local target [p(L) = .75], a low probability [p(L) = .25], and equal
probability [p(L) = 31. (B) Mean errors for the same experimental data.
FIG.

sphere dissociation. In addition, the results demonstrated that the cost/

benefit tradeoff indicative of attentional distribution could be disrupted
independently from an overah global or local advantage. The LSTG group
showed a lateralized global/local dissociation between hemispheres, but
evidence for normal attentional control, while the LIPL group showed
normal baseline relative global/local response but evidence for reduced or
negligible attentional control. These effects seem to be specific to posterior cortical damage. We recently used the same procedure to test pa-

PART/WHOLE

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315

tients with unilateral dorsolateral frontal lesions, and the data from these
groups did not differ from normals in either global/local baseline advantage or the cost/benefit tradeoffs but were significantly different from
STG in the former and IPL patients in the latter (Robertson, Lamb, &
Knight, submitted for publication).
Before accepting that the cost/benefit tradeoff differences between
groups were due to changes in attentional allocation, certain alternative
explanations for these tradeoffs should be considered. First, the LIPL
group had an overall shorter response time, and the LSTG group had an
overall longer response time than controls. It is possible that the pattern
of results simply reflected an overall speed-accuracy tradeoff due to some
criterion shift that might have interacted with the effects of probability
schedules. The error rates for each group are important in addressing this
question and are plotted in Fig. 5B. The errors were too low for controls
to have much value but are included because they show that the shorter
reaction times for LIPL were probably due to an overall speed-accuracy
tradeoff (i.e., a criterion shift) between the controls and the LIPL groups.
Controls produced fewer errors and had longer reaction times, while
LIPL produced more errors and had shorter reaction times. The error rate
for controls was minimal, while the error rate for the LIPL group was
14%. On the other hand, it would be difficult to argue that the overall
difference in reaction time between LIPL and LSTG was due to a difference in speed-accuracy tradeoff between these two groups, because the
LSTG group made 13% errors or essentially equal to that of the LIPL
group *
The error rates are also important in addressing a closely related question. Could the cost/benefit tradeoffs reflect criterion shifts that were
different for groups over the probability schedules? Reaction time in patients with LIPL lesions may not have changed as much as for the LSTG
group and controls because LIPL patients did not change their criterion
normally. Obviously response bias could not be critical because the response was not whether a target was at the global or local level. Rather,
the task was to identify the target independent of the level at which it
occurred. How then could criterion shifts produce costs that mirror benefits over the two levels? We must first postulate a link between two
criteria, one that becomes less stringent for the most probable level at a
rate equal to one that becomes more stringent for the less probable level.
These shifts would mean that less information would be required before
responding to a target if it occurred at the most probable level, mirrored
by an effect where more information would be required before responding
to a target if it occurred at the less probable level (i.e., there should be a
speed-accuracy tradeoff within each group over probability schedules).
No such tradeoffs occurred. This was most evident for the LSTG group

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ROBERTSON

AND LAMB

where we are claiming that attention was intact and in the LIPL group
where we are claiming it was not. The cost/benefit tradeoffs over probability schedules were significant and in the same direction for both reaction time and errors for the LSTG group and were both reliably different
from the LIPL group.3
Another possible explanation for the reduced cost/benefit tradeoff in
the LIPL group may simply be that patients in this group ignored unequal
probabilities. However, there is no evidence that we know of either in the
animal or human literature that suggests parietal damage should disrupt
response to frequency distributions
or differential probabilities,
while
there is a great deal of evidence that the parietal lobe is involved in
attention (see Bushnell, Goldberg, & Robinson, 1981; Lynch, 1980;
Mountcastle,
1978; Wurtz, Goldberg, & Robinson, 1980). It is therefore
highly likely that the reduced cost/benefit tradeoff in the LIPL group was
not due to ignoring the changes in the frequency of a target at a given level
but was due to deficits in controlling attentional allocation.4
To summarize, the cost/benefit tradeoffs produced by the *probability
schedules were reduced in the LIPL group compared to normal controls
but not in the LSTG group. This fact demonstrates that the measure of
attentional distribution can be affected separately from the overall local or
global advantage. Likewise, the global or local advantage can be affected
without affecting cost/benefit tradeoffs.
These findings are consistent with data reported in the cognitive liter-

3 Although we did not report an error analysis in the original paper, an ANOVA of the
error data between LIPL and LSTG revealed a highly reliable group by level by probability
schedule interaction @ < .Ol) in errors that mirrored reaction time. Analysis of errors
between individual groups revealed significant cost/benefit tradeoffs for the LSTG group @
< .005) that were significantly reduced for LIPL (p < .Ol). The LIPL group did show a
significant effect of level in errors favoring the local level, which may throw doubt on our
conclusions that change in overall reaction time to level is isolated to STG regions. However, in two subsequent experiments LIPL groups showed either no level advantage or a
global level advantage in errors, while the direction of the reaction time advantage was the
same as controls in every case. This variability across experiments in the error rate is
probably due to chance. There are only three possibilities in terms of a level advantage, a
global one, a local one, or neither. In errors IPL groups produced all three over three
experiments but showed consistency in reaction time advantage.
4 One may argue that global and local levels were simply weighted differently over the
three probability conditions and we would agree. However, the distinction between
weighting and attentional allocation becomes murky under conditions where cost/benefit
tradeoffs occur. All we mean by an attentional mechanism here is that some operation with
limited resources modulates the information for one parameter at the expense of another.
Either weighting or distribution
could cause such an effect. These resources are limited because the sum of the distribution or the sum of the weighting is assumed to equal 1.O.

PART/WHOLE

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317

ature concerning the influence of attentional processes in the analysis of

global and local levels, but they are inconsistent with the idea that a global
or local advantage is due to either some perceptual process or some
attentional reallocation. It is clearly due to both. Each process can be
disrupted independently
by lesions centered in different cortical locations .
The fact that the neuropsychological
evidence demonstrates that these
processes can be affected separately supports our contention that the
perceptual system in normals responds to global and local levels independently in initial stages of processing (interhemispheric
differences) and
that controlled attentional processes distribute resources between level
information within these channels to modulate the incoming information
(intrahemispheric
differences). Different regions of posterior cortex
uniquely affect attentional and perceptual operations in hierarchical organization and different regions uniquely affect response to global and
local levels. The bottom-up processes include separate channels asymmetrically associated with posterior superior temporal-parietal
regions
that probably respond to relative spatial frequencies at the two levels. In
one channel, global features of a stimulus are more strongly represented
than local, and, in another, local features are more strongly represented
than global. The attentional processes control resource distribution within
these channels and are associated with inferior parietal lobe. Interestingly, Posner, Walker, Friedrich, & Rafal(l984) found that patients with
parietal damage had difficulty in a component of visual attention responsible for disengaging attention from a location and moving it elsewhere in
the visual field and Eglin, Robertson, & Knight (1989) found a similar
effect of ipsilateral stimuli in a visual search task in patients with acute
neglect. The data we have collected in humans demonstrate that other
types of spatial attentional control are also associated with the parietal
lobe.
To this point we have shown that the control of attentional allocation to
global and local levels can be affected independently
from bottom-up
cortical processes that produce an overall global or local advantage.
Given the parallel pathways operating in the human brain, the most reasonable model is a type of horse-race model between two processing
channels that analyze information either emphasizing global over local
forms or local over global forms and is likely to be strongly influenced by
the relative spatial frequencies at the two levels. An additional process
associated with the parietal lobe distributes attention within these channels accordingly to modulate their output. The reason we call this model
a type of horse-race model is because there must also be operations to
account for global or local interference or facilitation. As we will see in

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ROBERTSON

AND

LAMB

the next section, the interaction between levels that must be present to
cause these effects can also be disrupted independently from a global or
local advantage and from resource allocation between levels.
INTERACTIONS

BETWEEN

GLOBAL

AND LOCAL

LEVELS

All of the findings discussed so far have been primarily concerned with
the presence or absence of a global advantage, but the theory of global
precedence was based on two effects, a global advantage and global interference. Although some studies have found a local advantage and (less
frequently) local interference, the argument that one level was processed
before the other was based on the cooccurrence of a level advantage that
predicted level interference. In the studies with brain-injured
patients
that we have discussed so far, we have not mentioned measures of interference. In the study represented by findings in Fig. 5, the distractor was
never a target, so a comparison between conditions where both letters
were a target (consistent) or were not (inconsistent) could not be accomplished. In a subsequent experiment we therefore tested some of the same
patients as before with additional subjects in order to separate all patients
into either STG or IPL groups and examined the fate of interference.
Would patients with right hemisphere damage respond faster to local
levels and produce local interference and patients with left hemisphere
damage respond faster to global levels and produce global interference
even in a task where attention should be directed exclusively to one level
or the other? The answer was no. Interference and a global or local
advantage could vary independently. That is, a reaction time advantage at
one level or the other did not lead to the expected change in interference.
In fact, interference was eliminated entirely in STG patients, and this
occurred whether the level advantage was large or negligible (Lamb et al.,
1989).
This experiment was like Navons (1977) where subjects were shown
large Hs or Ss composed of small Hs or Ss and directed to respond to the
local letters in one block of trials and to the global letters in another. Also
the stimuli were presented either centrally or 2.7 into the periphery
where global interference has been most consistently observed in normals. The visual angle of the stimulus patterns was smaller than in the
previous study but similar to Navons. The smaller visual angle produced
a global reaction time advantage in normals and a slowed local response
when the letters were inconsistent
(global interference)
replicating
Navons pattern of results shown in Fig. 2. Also, as expected the overall
normal global/local by hemisphere dissociation occurred in left and right
STG groups relative to controls (see Table 1). But the most important
finding was that patients with lesions centered in the STG, whether right
or left, showed no interaction between global/local target level and con-

Mean

Controls
LSTG
RSTG

PART/WHOLE

ORGANIZATION

RT (msec)

TABLE
1
and RT Difference

319
(L - G)

Local

Global

Difference

719
1075
714

586
893
697

133
189
17

sistency (no interference), while groups with inferior parietal damage

(IPL) showed normal interference. This occurred whether patterns were
presented in the contralateral or ipsilateral visual field relative to the
lesion.
One possible interpretation
of this lack of interference is that global
interference in normals is due to attention being automatically
drawn to
this level and that this level did not automatically draw attention in STG
patients. Although the previous study (Robertson et al., 1988) demonstrated that STG groups showed normal cost/benefit tradeoffs indicative
of controlled attentional processes, it did not rule out a more passive
attentional contribution.
If attention were automatically
drawn to the
more global form it could then be processed sufficiently to interfere with
responding to local targets. In turn, if automatic attentional mechanisms
were defective in STG patients then no interference would occur because
information at the irrelevant level was simply not there. Another possible
explanation for the performance of STG patients is that the interaction
represents the normal tendency to integrate information at the two levels,
and that STG groups were deficient in this operation. The first explanation assumes that irrelevant information did not interfere in STG groups
because it was not sufficiently processed at the time of response, while
the second assumes that irrelevant information was available but was not
integrated normally. The question then was whether or not the availability
of information at the irrelevant level would interfere with a local response
in STG patients under conditions where the irrelevant information must
be processed. We addressed this question by returning to a divided attention task. On each trial a target appeared randomly at either one level
or the other and the subjects task was to identify the target independent
of the level at which it occurred (Lamb et al., 1990). Since the subjects
did not know which level would contain the target, this procedure guaranteed that a distractor at the irrelevant level would be processed, if only
on some trials, at least enough to reject the distractor as a possible target.
Interaction between levels was produced by varying the similarity of the
letters at the two levels. If STG patients in the previous study showed no
influence of information at the irrelevant level because the information
was not automatically processed, then interaction between levels should

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ROBERTSON

AND LAMB

occur in the present study because irrelevant information would be available at the time of response, at least on some occasions. However, if the
lack of interference were due to something else, such as a deficit in some
mechanism that is responsible for integration of information between levels, then STG groups would show no interference in the present study
despite distractor availability.
We measured interaction between levels by varying target and distractor similarity. Depending on the task, similar items can either decrease or
increase response time, and in the Navon task they seem to facilitate it.
In the stimuli used in Navons original study, the H and S were most
similar to themselves and reaction time was short, while the H and S were
least similar to each other and reaction time was long, but because both
letters were part of the response set, divided attention procedures could
not be used. In the stimulus set in Fig. 6, the H is physically more similar
to the A than to the E in the sense that an H would result if the top
horizontal bar of the A were removed. The E is more similar to the S than
the H in the sense that the upper left portion of the vertical line in the E
need only be moved horizontally to produce the S.
We knew from studies in normals (Lamb & Robertson, 1989) that the
more physically similar the letters were at the two levels the faster reac-

HHHHH
H
HHHHH
H
HHHHH
R
R
R
R
RRRRR
Fl
R
R
R

EEEEE
E

EEEEE

EEEEE

FIG. 6. Examples of stimulus patterns used by Lamb, Robertson, and Knight (1990)
showing the physical similarity relations between the patterns. H is more similar to A than
to E, while S is more similar to E than to A. See text for explanation.

PARTiWHOLE

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321

tion time would be when responding to a local target, although this similarity had no effect on responding to global targets. Just as in Navons
selective attention task the global form influenced a response to a local
target but not vice versa. Would the same interaction be observed in IPL
groups but be absent in STG groups as before? The answer was yes.
First, we replicated our earlier findings in normal controls. Reaction
time to local targets was affected by the similarity of a global distractor,
while reaction time to global targets was not. Reaction time to local targets was faster when the letters at the two levels were more similar than
when they were less similar. This effect can be seen in the upper panel of
Fig. 7. As before, the IPL group was normal in this respect (bottom
panel), and the STG group showed a complete lack of global intluence on
local response. Although there appears to be an interaction for global
targets, this was not significant. Although not depicted in the figure, this
lack of global influence occurred whether the lesions were in the right or
the left hemisphere, meaning that it occurred whether there was an overall global advantage as there was for the LSTG group or an overall local
advantage as there was for the RSTG group. Again, the availability of a
letter measured by the time taken to identify it at the global or local level
did not predict the existence of an interaction. Even under conditions
where distracters had to be rejected on some occasions, thus available, no
interaction was found in STG patients. The hypothesis that the lack of
interference in the STG patients in the Navon selective attention task was
due to a deficit in attention being automatically drawn to the irrelevant
level was not supported. Of course, this conclusion is based on the assumption that the interaction observed with similarity manipulations and
the interaction Navon first reported are due to the same underlying mechanism. Given that the same lesion disrupts both in the same way, and
given that the influence of one level on the other is in the same direction
in normals, this assumption seems warranted.
An equally important finding in this study was that the level advantage
did not predict the direction of interaction even in controls and IPL
groups where normal interaction was found. In both groups responses were
faster to local than global targets. Yet it was still the similarity of the
global form that affected reaction time to local targets and not vice versa.
Clearly, global interference is not dependent on a global advantage either
in normals or patients.
There is one other example in the cognitive literature that supports the
independence between level interaction and level advantage. Although
not the main point of the article, Navon and Norman (1983) demonstrated
that advantage and interference could vary independently.
They found
that changes in the degree of interference in normals could occur without
any corresponding change in the degree of global advantage. On the basis

322

ROBERTSON

AND LAMB

Control

900.
850.. t-0
Boo W

A Distractor
E Distractor

(N=l2)
.. A-A
A-A

A Distractor
E Distractor

1250..

lOOO-

.L"

950..

900'

STG (N=12)

1300e

IPL (~-6)

900,

650-e
600..
550 ..
500H

Global Target
Local Target
FIG. 7. Reaction time for the control group, for patients with lesions centered in the
superior temporal gyros (STG) and for patients with lesions centered in the inferior parietal
lobe (IPL) for global and local targets as a function of target and distractor letter. Reproduced, by permission of the American Psychological Association, from Lamb et al. (1990).

of these findings, Navon and Norman suggested a two stage model of

global precedence. The first stage produced global advantage and the
second determined the degree of global interference.
Our findings in normals also support a two stage model. However,
given that we found global influence on local response even when a local
advantage occurred, the order of these stages cannot be as Navon and

PARTiWHOLE

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323

Norman proposed. Rather, some early interaction between levels that

occurs before the availability of the form at a given level determines the
interaction. Despite the fact that this interaction is independent of the
response advantage to global or local forms per se, it does appear to favor
global information as Navon and Norman suggested. Global interference
on a local response can result even when reaction time is faster to local
targets. To our knowledge the opposite has not been found.
An interesting and potentially crucial point is that the effect of global
information on local response is more frequently found than mutual interaction effects, and we have never found local influence on global alone.
This suggests a process favoring global levels in producing the interaction. Perhaps the global form establishes the framework in which local
forms are placed. Several theories have suggested such accounts (Koflka,
1935; Palmer, 1983), and the asymmetric interaction may reflect this
structuring process. However, given our findings to date, we can only say
that the influence of one level on the other is consistent with global
framework accounts. So far we have only shown that the physical similarity of the global and local form influences responses to local forms.
Whether or not this reflects structure of the global form in which local
forms are positioned remains to be determined.
Although we do not know what properties of the stimulus are responsible for the interaction between global and local levels, we do know that
it is not based on the same analysis that produces global or local advantage. We have already shown several times that global information is
available sooner in LSTG groups and local information in RSTG groups
relative to controls. It follows from the independence between these level
advantages and interaction that the interaction effect cannot be based on
the available output of these asymmetrically
represented analyses. Although we do not yet know the function of the interaction or what parameters of the stimulus contribute to it, the evidence clearly supports the
independence of the interaction from global or local advantage.
The different way that global and local advantage and interaction are
affected by unilateral STG lesions also gives some hints about neural
functions that are associated with these two effects. The interaction effect
is not asymmetrically
represented as is global or local advantage. Damage
to one STG will bias the system to respond to global targets before local,
and damage to the other will bias it to respond to local targets before
global, but damage to either one will eliminate interaction, and this will
occur even when patterns are presented wholely within the ipsilateral
field to the intact hemisphere. Although the efficiency of responding to
global or local levels is lateralized, hemispheric cooperation seems to be
required in order to produce the normal interaction between levels.
Damage to other closely related visual areas also seems to affect the

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ROBERTSON

AND LAMB

interaction between global and local levels. Humphreys

and his colleagues (Humphreys & Riddoch, 1987; Humphreys, Riddoch, & Quinlan,
1985) reported no interaction in the Navon task in a patient diagnosed
with visual agnosia who had inferior bilateral prestriate lesions (HJA),
lesions that obviously disrupt cooperation between posterior regions of
the two hemispheres.
Additional
studies in this patient revealed that
under conditions in which normals showed facilitation between levels
HJA did not do so (Humphreys, personal communication).
Normal facilitation was found when HJA responded to a redundant target such as HH
versus HO, but no facilitation occurred when the redundancy was between levels, showing that the interaction between letters depended on
the hierarchical structure of the stimulus.
Humphreys
and Riddoch (1987) concluded that HJA had difftculty
binding
global and local levels of a visual pattern. Although again it is
not clear what is being bound, these data in conjunction with our own
converge on the idea that the influence of global information
on local
(either interference or facilitation) relies on hemispheric coordination between posterior visual regions. Damage to either STG will result in a lack
of interaction as will bilateral inferior prestriate damage. (We do not yet
know whether unilateral prestriate damage will affect the interaction similarly.) Other posterior areas necessary for interhemispheric
transfer may
also be critical for interactions between levels, but it is probably more
prudent to suggest that there is some critical overlap between the lesions
in our STG groups and HJA that disrupted the transfer of information
between posterior regions, either because the information was not there
to be transferred or because the transfer itself was affected. We thus
conclude that the lack of interaction is due to disruption of cooperation
between posterior cortical visual areas in the two hemispheres, whereas
the global/local asymmetry is due to cortical modularity in which LSTG
regions respond more efficiently to local information and RSTG regions to
global information. This model would also predict that patients who have
undergone commissurotomy
extending through posterior fibers would
show no interaction between levels but would be able to respond to each
level accurately given enough time. However, responses should be slower
to local than global information if presented to the right hemisphere of
such patients and slower to global than local information if presented to
the left hemisphere all else being equal.

5 This finding was compromised by the fact that response time to local targets was greatly
elevated compared to normals. Thus the effect could have been due to the global level being
processed completely by HJA before local analysis began. Given the remainder of the
discussion in this section, this explanation is unlikely.

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325

COMPONENTS
OF HIERARCHICAL
ORGANIZATION
As a result of the combined investigation of normal and abnormal hierarchical organization, the picture of global or local precedence that is
emerging is one of a set of subsystems that in the normal brain strongly
interact to analyze the hierarchical relations between objects. The results
of these investigations are neutral concerning how objects are recognized
or how parts such as lines and angles form an object. They are also neutral
on whether these subsystems respond differently when the nature of the
parts are critical for identification
of the whole [what Pomerantz (1983)
calls Type N parts] or when the position of the parts define the whole
(Type P parts) as they do with Navon-type patterns. We have tried to
make it very clear that our results apply to whole objects perceived within
other whole objects as a function of their location in the hierarchy. Despite claims to the contrary, these patterns are prevalent. A series of
drawers stacked atop one another is perceived as a filing cabinet, while
two columns of drawers with a board across the top is perceived as a
desk. In this case, it is not the nature of the local objects per se that
designate the global identity, it is their position. Perhaps a more compelling example is a face. An eye certainly suggests the presence of a face but
one need not perceive the nature of the parts to perceive a face. Three
dots and a crescent positioned appropriately in a circle will be perceived
as a happy face, while an eye placed below a mouth in a circle will not be
perceived as a face at all. This is not to say that the nature of parts is not
important in recognizing objects, but it does demonstrate that position
information is important as we11.6
The neuropsychological
evidence has also demonstrated quite conclusively that global advantage in responding to such patterns need not lead
6 It has also been argued that sequencing local forms to represent an intrinsic part of an
object may produce effects that have little to do with the way perception normally works.
The top vertical line of the S in Fig. 1 is intrinsic to the S but is made from smaller forms,
and it is certainly true that Ss are not normally seen with this structure. However, the
objection is not the fact that Fig. 1 is a novel form of a familiar object, but that its structure
is novel and therefore requires operations that operate on artificial stimuli. We would take
issue with this argument as well. A group of leaves on a tree can define a branch even when
the individual leaves are perceived as forms themselves and even when the branch is not in
view. A group of flowers can define the border of a yard whether or not the individual
flowers can be seen. It is not the case that the sort of structures represented by Navon
figures do not occur in nature. Yet even if we could not generate these examples from
everyday life, it would not mean that an altered structure that is only seen in the laboratory
tells us nothing or little about normal perceptual function. It is rare to see monochromatic
colors in daily life, yet the use of monochromatic colors in the laboratory were critical in the
study of color vision. Likewise, the perceptual system analyzes Navon patterns systematically and as we have shown in the present paper the system also breaks down systematically when presented with such forms.

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to global interference and local advantage need not lead to local interference. The fact that the same lesion can produce both a global advantage
and no interaction or a local advantage and no interaction is important. It
means that the interaction is not a direct result of coordinating the final
output of the information processed by the asymmetrically
represented
channels. The advantage in availability of global or local information in a
given channel does not predict the interaction or lack thereof. If these
channels are responding differentially to the relative spatial frequencies in
the pattern as the evidence suggests they might, then it follows that the
interaction is not related to this relative spatial frequency analysis but to
some other process. The evidence to date gives little guidance as to what
attributes contribute to this process, but it appears to be asymmetric with
global influence occurring more than local and with similarity of the global
pattern determining the degree of interaction that will be observed.
In addition, we know that a separate mechanism controlling distribution of resources within channels can change the baseline level advantage
to one level or the other and is associated with the caudal lateral parietal
lobe. The type of attentional mechanism that is disrupted in parietal patients is resource limited. There are cost/benefit tradeoffs according to the
probability that a target will appear at a given level. Independence between the modulation of information within a channel and the processes
conducted by the channels themselves is supported by the fact that resource allocation is disrupted in IPL patients and not in STG patients,
while overall global or local advantage is disrupted in STG and not in IPL
patients. In addition, IPL patients consistently produce normal interaction between levels demonstrating that controlling attentional allocation
between global and local levels is not responsible for interference or
facilitation between levels.
In a world where important information may appear at any level of
structure, having at least two subsystems, one that responds to global
information more rapidly and one that responds to local information more
rapidly has obvious advantages over one that only operates according to
global precedence or only operates according to local precedence. Any
level may contain the more relevant information in any given situation. It
also seems reasonable that a mechanism would exist that could modulate
the rate at which global and local information was analyzed by distributing resources between levels to increase the chance of perceiving information at a predesignated level. In the future we may find more than two
subsystems that respond to various levels of structure with attention modulating the operations in all of them but to date we have only examined
two. It also seems reasonable that the interaction between levels would be
independent of the analysis of forms at each level. Integration of forms
need not be performed by the same mechanism that identifies them. This

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type of division of labor may be advantageous because it could allow

objects at the different levels to remain perceptually separate and yet be
integrated without losing their object status.
Whatever the ecological validity of the results, several conclusions can
be reached. The study of neurological patients and normal subjects demonstrates that there is global superiority in the human visual system as
Krechevsky first suggested but that there is also local superiority. It is
also the case that performance advantages for global or local levels cannot
be entirely attributed to controlled attentional processes, although attentional allocation can affect the relative performance between global and
local levels. Also the role of peripheral sensory input is not a major factor
in accounting for the main findings, and, although sensory limitations
must have some effect on subsequent processing, it appears that cortical
mechanisms play a much larger role in responding to hierarchically organized patterns (at least within the limits tested).
Furthermore,
the convergence between normal and pathological evidence is strong and argues against a neural reorganization explanation of
patient performance. Global/local by hemisphere dissociations are not
only found in unilateral brain-damaged patients, but they are also found in
normals using visual field presentation. Interference and advantage are
independent in brain-damaged populations but they can also vary independently in normals under specified conditions. Resources divided between global and local levels modulate information in patients the same
way they do in normals but can be affected independently from an overall
global or local advantage. We thus conclude that global superiority in
hierarchical organization is correct but only half correct, and it was premature to question it on the basis of evidence for local advantage, sensory
operations, and attentional control. All play a part in the final hierarchical
organization of objects that we see, with interconnected
yet separate
neural subsystems guiding the final solution.
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(Accepted April 26, 1990)