Abstract
Past research has identified visual objects as the units of information processing in visual short-term memory (VSTM) and has shown that two features from the same object can be remembered in VSTM as well (or almost as well) as one feature of that object and are much better remembered than the same two features from two spatially separated objects. It is not clear, however, what drives this object benefit in VSTM. Is it the shared spatial location (proximity), the connectedness among features of an object, or both? In six change detection experiments, both location/proximity and connectedness were found to be crucial in determining the magnitude of the object benefit in VSTM. Together, these results indicate that location/proximity and connectedness are essential elements in defining a coherent visual object representation in VSTM. nt]mis|This research was conducted while Y.X. was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Vision Sciences Laboratory, Psychology Department, Harvard University. Part of this research was first presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2003), Vancouver. It was supported by the James McDonnell Foundation program in cognitive neuroscience, Grant JSMF 2002045, and by the National Science Foundation program in cognitive neuroscience, Grant NSF BCS-0518138, to Y.X.
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Xu, Y. Understanding the object benefit in visual short-term memory: The roles of feature proximity and connectedness. Perception & Psychophysics 68, 815–828 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193704
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193704