An artistic rendering of how patients with simultanagnosia perceive a visual scene. An artistic rendering of how patients with simultanagnosia perceive a visual scene. The narrow spotlight of visual attention is directed to local, constituent parts of the scene at the expense of the global gestalt. Additionally, although patients tend to fixate on salient components initially, their attention is subsequently drawn towards uninformative elements of the scene (see online supplementary file reference S3). As a consequence, they fail to integrate these individual elements and create a coherent, visual representation that they can recognise as the iconic Palace of Westminster. Shin C Beh et al. Pract Neurol 2015;15:5-13 ©2015 by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd