Comment on Shomstein, Kimchi, Hammer, and Behrmann (2010): a case study in methodological anosagnosia?

Shomstein, Kimchi, Hammer, and Behrmann (2010) try to capitalize on the apparent dissociation between vision and the processes that seem to mediate neglect patients' attentional selection and awareness to investigate the processing of perceptual grouping in the absence of visual attention. We argue that to assess this type of dissociation requires specific methodological adaptations to determine whether visual attention is in operation. We caution that Shomstein et al.'s article does not present convincing evidence of grouping without attentional selection because they do not directly assess attentional selection in their experimental task.