Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A key question motivating research in perception and attention is how the brain represents visual information. One aspect of this representation is the coordinate or reference frame with respect to which visual features are encoded. To determine the frames of reference involved in human vision and attention, neurological patients with unilateral neglect have been extensively studied. Neglect patients often fail to orient toward, explore, and respond to stimuli on the left. The interesting question is: with respect to what frame of reference is neglect of the left manifested? W h e n a neglect patient shows a deficit in attentional allocation that depends not merely on the location of an object with respect to the viewer but on the extent, shape, or movement of the object itself, the inference is often made that attentional allocation must be operating in an object-based frame of reference. Via simulations of an existing connectionist model of spatial attention (Mozer, 1991; Mozer & Sitton, 1998), w e argue that this inference is not logically necessary: object-based attentional effects in neglect can be obtained without object-based frames of reference.