The present study examined whether patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) focus on details at the expense of global aspects. A recent study of our group using Navon letters (e.g., the letter "S" composed out of "A" letters) did not yield differences between OCD patients and controls on local processing. However, the task used may have lacked sensitivity, because it did not involve a ...

In a visual search task, subjects had to decide which of 2 possible target letters was presented among 12 distractor letters. The 13 characters were arranged to form a global Navon-type letter. The global letter and the local letters (target and distractors) were independently presented in four different viewer-related orientations. When the global letter and the target were frequently congruen...

In a paper published in the 10:4 issue of JOCN, Heinze et al. 1998) studied a directed attention task using hierarchically organized letter Navon stimuli. On the basis of negative PET and ERP findings, they argue that``early sensory inputs are not modulated to gate global vs. local visual information differentially into the two hemispheres .'' Rather, based on positive ERP findings (an N2 effec...

The processing of Navon figures (Navon, 1977), i.e., hierarchical letter stimuli, has been studied in experimental settings for many years. In particular, they have been studied in the context of visual hemifield studies and yielded an interaction between hemifield and whether a target is at the local or global level, with a right hemisphere advantage for the global level, and a left hemisphere...

Many studies have revealed mood induced changes in the cognitive processing of different tasks. Recent studies show that negative moods lead to a switch in the style of processing while positive moods lead to a continuation of the preferred style of processing. Two of the centers responsible for mood regulations also play a big role in modulating different patterns of locus coeruleus norepineph...