Pay Attention To The Role Of Feature Bundling In Visual Working Memory

Visual information rarely consists of single-feature objects in our daily life, presentedwithout accompanying context. Without encoding and holding in memory the connectionsbetween constituent elements of objects, or the connections between objects and the contextin which they were encountered, the visual environment around us would be difficult tocomprehend. The connection processes and the temporary storage of them involved haveformed a major focus problem for recent work in the area of working memory, that is featurebinding. A central question has been whether the binding processes need additional centralattention support or not. The feature binding process was initially assumed to depend uponexecutive attention resources, and episodic buffer component of working memory is assumedto play a central role in the binding of features into objects. However, Recent studies ofvisual short-term memory have suggested that that visual feature binding based on Gestaltprinciples is independent of executive control. That is to say, this type of feature binding isrelatively automatic. It is possible that feature bindings can develop automatically throughperceptual processes only when the features are part of a visually unitized object or pattern.Separation of features across space or time may rule out automatic, perceptually basedbinding and may shift responsibility to an attention-demanding set of processes. Here, Wetherefore carried out a series of three experiments to explicitly explore the effect of attentionload on feature binding of visual working memory.The three experiments in this text used dual-task methodology to compare the effects ofa concurrent executive attention load on the capacity to encode and retain both individualfeatures (such as color or shape) and feature bindings (colored shapes),which is aimedspecifically to explore whether feature bindings in visual working memory need additionalexecutive attention supports. Attention load was manipulated with a demanding three-backward counting concurrent task, and retention for single feature or feature binding inworking memory was then tested using a single recognition probe. We always found nodifferential effect of concurrent load on the capacity to encode and retain both individualfeatures and bound objects in all three experiments, even when the process of binding wasmade more demanding by individually separating the shape and color features spatially or temporally in experiment two and experiment three. The findings provide further evidencefor a relatively visual feature binding mechanism in working memory. Implications for theprocess of binding in visual working memory are discussed, and an interpretation is offeredin terms of the episodic buffer component of working memory.