ABSTRACT
The topic of this chapter is implicit perception in patients with parietal lobe lesions and the implications of this phenomenon for theories of attention. The dissociation between implicit and explicit cognitive processes has received much attention in neuropsychology lately. People who have apparently lost certain cognitive functions, such as the ability to learn new information, following a brain injury, are often able to demonstrate these same abilities when tested in specific ways (see Schacter, McAndrews, & Moscovitch, 1988, for a review). For instance, patients with amnesia might not explicitly remember having been shown a list of words and will not be able to recall the words on this list, but when asked to complete a three-letter stem with any word that comes to mind they will more often use a word that they saw on the list. Cowey, Young, and Coslett and Saffran (chapters 1, 11, & 12 ofthis volume) review the literature on implicit perception in cortical blindness, prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces) and alexia (inability to recognize printed words).
