93
Views
1
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Functional roles of memory for feature-location binding in event perception: Investigation with spatiotemporal visual search

Pages 212-231 | Published online: 16 Jan 2009
 

Abstract

In a dynamic environment full of degraded or missing perceptual information, memory might facilitate or even substitute efficiently for perception. We tested this idea with a “spatiotemporal search” task that required participants to search for a target defined by a binding of two features across a single object, across two points in time. Eight coloured bars moved horizontally until they became partially occluded behind squares. Before the tail of the bar becomes occluded, the head of the bar reemerged with a possibly different colour. Observers were precued a subset of the bars, and judged the presence of a colour changing target among the precued set. A series of three experiments revealed that memory can substitute for perception only for one object, and that the preview of colour-location binding does not facilitate perceptual processing. Cueing location and object features do not have additive effects. Binding memory may have highly limited capacity in substitution and facilitation of perception.

Acknowledgements

I thank Steve Franconeri, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the earlier draft of the paper. This work was partially supported from Grants-in-Aid (#13610084, #14019053, and #19500226) from JMEXT, the Global COE Program “Revitalizing Education for Dynamic Hearts and Minds”, from JMEXT, and PRESTO from JST.

Notes

1A follow-up experiment (N=7) replicated Experiment 3 with two reappearance durations (200 ms and 680 ms), and without the perception-plus-memory condition to eliminate strategic uncertainty. To evaluate overwriting effect, a long-occluder condition, where objects’ tail was occluded at the time of head reappearance, was added. Using accuracy increment from 200 ms to 680 ms conditions as an index, both memory (M=0.185) and long-occluder (M=0.208) conditions showed significantly smaller increment relative to the perception condition (M=0.357) with Tukey's HSD test (both p<.005), suggesting that neither overwriting nor strategic uncertainty was primary cause of the memory cost.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.