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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Nov 11.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Cogn Sci. 2009 Mar 9;13(4):167–174. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.01.008

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Our neural object-file theory posits that there is an object individuation stage in which a fixed number of about four objects are first individuated and selected from a crowded scene based on their spatial information by the inferior intra-parietal sulcus (IPS), and an object identification stage in which a subset of the selected objects are encoded into greater detail by higher visual areas and the superior IPS. Although object individuation normally precedes object identification, results of object identification can refine or modify what is selected during initial object individuation, such as in perceiving occluded objects.