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Disentangling functional from structural descriptions, and the coordinating role of attention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2007

Knut Drewing
Affiliation:
General and Experimental Psychology, Institute for Psychology, Justus-Liebig University – Giessen, D-35394 Giessen, GermanyKnut.Drewing@psychol.uni-giessen.dehttp://www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/knut/
Werner X. Schneider
Affiliation:
Neurocognitive Psychology Unit, Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University – Munich, D-80802 Munich, Germany. wxs@psy.uni-muenchen.dehttp://www.psy.lmu.de/exp/ma/schneider.html

Abstract

The target article fails to disentangle the functional description from the structural description of the two somatosensory streams. Additional evidence and thorough reconsideration of the evidence cited argue for a functional distinction between the how processing and the what processing of somatosensory information, while questioning the validity and usefulness of the equation of these two types of processing with structural streams. We propose going one step further: to investigate how the distinct functional streams are coordinated via attention.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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