Cross-modal binding and working memory

Abstract

We examine the role of general attention in the binding of colour and shape across the visual and verbal modalities. Three experiments studied the effects of concurrent tasks on the binding and retention of either unified visual stimuli, namely coloured shapes, or cross-modal stimuli in which one feature involved visual and the other auditory presentation. Performance accuracy was broadly equivalent across conditions, and was unimpaired by spatial tapping but impaired by backward counting. The decrement was however, no greater for the cross-modal binding conditions, suggesting that the act of binding is not itself attention demanding. Implications for this unexpected finding are discussed.

Keywords:

• Binding
• Attention
• Working memory
• Colour
• Shape

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by MRC grant G9423916. We thank Robert Logie and Daniel Gajewski for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

¹Serial position curves showed clear recency effects in all three experiments, in agreement with previous data on memory for feature binding for sequentially presented stimuli (see, e.g., Allen et al., 2006). However, serial position effects were not very informative over and above this, as they did not show any consistent interactions with experimental conditions.