The Neuropsychology of Feature Binding and Conscious Perception

Research on neuropsychology of consciousness owes very much to Anne Treisman’ Feature Integration Theory (FIT). FIT has stimulated studies in many different fields of cognitive neurosciences and played a fundamental role in increasing our understanding of the processes underlying conscious object perception. In this paper, I briefly outline how FIT has been used to account for the lack of stimulus awareness observed in classical neuropsychological syndromes characterized by dissociations between impaired and preserved cognitive processing of either spatial or content stimulus features. While FIT has shown some critical limitations, it proves to still be a powerful interpretative framework for major phenomena related to loss of conscious perception after brain damage. In particular, I argue that, even though spatial processing and some types of feature binding have been shown to occur implicitly in brain-damaged patients, the binding of content features of objects to their locations plays a crucial role in conscious visual experience.