Guidance of Attention from Visual Working Memory is Feature-based, not Object-based: Implications for Models of Feature Binding

Abstract

All data from our study investigating whether the representational unit of working memory used to guide attention are directly bound objects or individual features. Across our three main experiments, participants remembered the color and shape of two presented items. We evaluated the effects of incidental and strategic guidance of remembered information during a visual search task. Control experiments show that both the color and shape of remembered items influenced behavioral performance. Our main experiments provide evidence against a direct-integration model, suggesting that items in working memory are represented as individual features. Data have been uploaded as .txt files