Leiden University Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, the Netherlands.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2010 Oct;36(5):1184-92. doi: 10.1037/a0019955.
Given the distributed representation of visual features in the human brain, binding mechanisms are necessary to integrate visual information about the same perceptual event. It has been assumed that feature codes are bound into object files--pointers to the neural codes of the features of a given event. The present study investigated the perceptual criteria underlying integration into an object file. Previous studies confounded the sharing of spatial location with belongingness to the same perceptual object, 2 factors we tried to disentangle. Our findings suggest that orientation and color features appearing in a task-irrelevant preview display were integrated irrespective of whether they appeared as part of the same object or of different objects (e.g., 1 stationary and the other moving continuously, or a banana in a particular orientation overlaying an apple of a particular color). In contrast, integration was markedly reduced when the 2 objects were separated in space. Taken together, these findings suggest that spatial overlap of visual features is a sufficient criterion for integrating them into the same object file.
鉴于视觉特征在人类大脑中的分布式表示，绑定机制对于整合关于同一感知事件的视觉信息是必要的。人们假设特征代码被绑定到对象文件中——指向给定事件的特征的神经代码的指针。本研究调查了整合到对象文件中的感知标准。先前的研究将空间位置的共享与属于同一感知对象混为一谈，我们试图将这两个因素区分开来。我们的研究结果表明，在任务无关的预览显示中出现的方向和颜色特征被整合在一起，而不管它们是否属于同一个物体或不同的物体（例如，一个静止的，另一个连续移动的，或者一个特定方向的香蕉覆盖着一个特定颜色的苹果）。相比之下，当两个物体在空间上分开时，整合程度明显降低。总之，这些发现表明，视觉特征的空间重叠是将它们整合到同一个对象文件中的充分标准。
