Abstract

Glyn Humphreys' research on attention and binding began from feature-integration theory, which claims that binding together visual features, such as colour and orientation, requires spatially selective attention. Humphreys employed a more inclusive notion of binding and argued, on neuropsychological grounds, for a multi-stage account of the overall binding process, in which binding together of form elements was followed by two stages of feature binding. Only the second stage of feature binding, a re-entrant process beginning in posterior parietal cortex and returning to early visual areas, required attention. In line with his commitment to converging evidence, Humphreys considered that investigating the role of attention in motion-induced blindness could be a route to better understanding of the cognitive role of the attention-dependent second stage of feature binding. He suggested that this role might be to resolve ambiguity and to generate a single consistent interpretation of the perceptual input.