Abstract
This study reports some of the first evidence about eye movement patterns during object recognition in a case of acquired visual agnosia. The eye movements of an integrative visual agnosic patient IES and controls were recorded during two object recognition tasks: Object naming and novel object recognition memory. Differences in the spatial distributions of IES's fixations, and fixation dwell times, were correlated with recognition performance in object naming. In addition, in both object naming and novel object recognition memory, the patient showed abnormal saccade amplitudes with a bias towards shorter saccades. In contrast, the patient showed normal directional biases and sensitivity to low-level visual saliency. It is suggested that this bias towards low amplitude saccades, and the aberrant spatial distribution of fixations, reflects a breakdown in the functional link between bottom-up and top-down guidance of eye movements during shape perception.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012