Location-independent feature binding in visual working memory for sequentially presented objects

Abstract

Spatial location is believed to have a privileged role in binding features held in visual working memory. Supporting this view, Pertzov and Husain (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76(7), 1914–1924, 2014) reported that recall of bindings between visual features was selectively impaired when items were presented sequentially at the same location compared to sequentially at different locations. We replicated their experiment, but additionally tested whether the observed impairment could be explained by perceptual interference during encoding. Participants viewed four oriented bars in highly discriminable colors presented sequentially either at the same or different locations, and after a brief delay were cued with one color to reproduce the associated orientation. When we used the same timing as the original study, we reproduced its key finding of impaired binding memory in the same-location condition. Critically, however, this effect was significantly modulated by the duration of the inter-stimulus interval, and disappeared if memoranda were presented with longer delays between them. In a second experiment, we tested whether the effect generalized to other visual features, namely reporting of colors cued by stimulus shape. While we found performance deficits in the same-location condition, these did not selectively affect binding memory. We argue that the observed effects are best explained by encoding interference, and that memory for feature binding is not necessarily impaired when memoranda share the same location.

Imagery-related eye movements in 3D space depend on individual differences in visual object imagery

“…Individuals who are able to create and maintain clear and vivid mental representations may rely less on spatial information associated with the location of previously encoded stimuli. This supports recent findings suggesting that integrated object representations are not necessarily grounded in spatial location (e.g., when stimuli are serially presented at the same spatial location) 37 . Interestingly, and against our expectation, the magnitude of the looking at nothing effect is not associated with increased self-reported spatial imagery abilities and the IST.…”

Encode a Letter and Get Its Location for Free? Assessing Incidental Binding of Verbal and Spatial Features

“…Indeed, they found evidence to support this in memory for not just numbers, but verbal information too (fruit and vegetable names). This finding is intriguing when paired with the findings of a study conducted by [ 35 ] on location-independent feature binding. In this study, participants performed better in visual working memory tasks when the sequentially presented items were presented in different locations than when they were presented all in the same location, an effect that the authors attributed to encoding interference.…”

Temporal and spatial reference frames in visual working memory are defined by ordinal and relational properties.

“…Regardless of the relative extent of memory impairments associated with spatial or temporal transformations, our results show that spatial and temporal reference frames share the same metrical properties, which dovetails nicely with other findings indicating a functional equivalence of space and time in visual working memory. For instance, both spatial location and temporal (ordinal) position mediate the binding of surface features like color or shape (Schneegans et al, 2022), memory items that are spatially or temporally close are more easily confused (e.g., Rerko et al, 2014; Sapkota et al, 2016; Schneegans et al, 2021), prioritization of visual working memory contents based on temporal position is as direct, fast and effective as prioritization based on spatial location (Heuer & Rolfs, 2022) and the removal of distinctive but task-irrelevant spatial or temporal properties at retrieval interferes with memory, whereas no similar costs were observed when distinctive variations in other task-irrelevant feature dimensions were taken away (Heuer & Rolfs, 2021). Moreover, memory appears to rely more on either space or time, depending on the distribution of items in either domain and hence its usefulness for item individuation: When items are spatially close, temporal separation can be leveraged to differentiate between items, and vice versa (Heuer & Rolfs, 2021; see also Schneegans et al, 2021).…”

“…For the temporal domain, the critical properties for reference frames in visual working memory are unknown. The temporal structure of visual events is often mainly thought of as temporal order, especially with respect to feature binding—here, serial position might take over the role of spatial location in indexing bound objects (Manohar et al, 2017; Schneegans & Bays, 2019; Schneegans et al, 2021). A first piece of evidence indicates that ordinal transformations of temporal configurations indeed affect memory for a nontemporal feature (i.e., spatial relations, Rondina et al, 2017).…”