Feature binding storage in visuospatial short-term memory: The effects of spatial proximity modulation

Authors

Aymen Ben Abbes^1,*, Thierry Ripoll²

¹Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia.
²National Center for Scientific Research, Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, Marseille, France.

Abstract

Research on Localized Attentional Interference has shown that attentional selection of an object in the visual field impairs the processing of adjacent stimuli. The goal of this study was to investigate how such spatial effect influences the feature-binding and storing of multiple objects in visuospatial short-term memory. To carry out this experiment, we manipulated the distance between targets and the difference between a test object and a previously presented target in the same location. The results showed the presence of a reliable increase of binding errors when the target and the test object were spatially close. Conversely, binding errors decreased when Test objects were distant from target and remained largely at the same level for both contiguous and noncontiguous targets conditions. The results extend the Localized Attentional Interference hypothesis by suggesting that spatial proximity between objects could have effects on features binding and could be considered as a one of the determinant factors of illusory conjunction phenomenon.

Keywords: Localized Attentional Interference, spatial proximity, feature binding, attention, visuospatial short-term memory

PAGES:47-57

doi:10.24193/cbb.2018.22.04

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