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Early binding of feature pairs for visual perception

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Abstract

If features such as color and orientation are processed separately by the brain at early stages1,2, how does the brain subsequently match the correct color and orientation? We found that spatially superposed pairings of orientation with either color or luminance could be reported even for extremely high rates of presentation, which suggests that these features are coded in combination explicitly by early stages, thus eliminating the need for any subsequent binding of information. In contrast, reporting the pairing of spatially separated features required rates an order of magnitude slower, suggesting that perceiving these pairs requires binding at a slow, attentional stage.

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Figure 1: The critical rates for 75% accuracy in pairing spatially superimposed features (depicted by the second and fourth icons along the horizontal axis) are nearly ten times faster than rates for pairing spatially separated features (first and third icons).
Figure 2: The critical rates for 75% accuracy do not differ significantly when spatially separated features are linked to form a group or object (white bars, unlinked versions as depicted by the left icon of each pair; black bars, linked versions as depicted by the right icon of each pair.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an NEI NRSA graduate fellowship to A.O.H. and EY09258 to P.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Vision Sciences Laboratory, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Alex O. Holcombe & Patrick Cavanagh

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  1. Alex O. Holcombe
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  2. Patrick Cavanagh
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Correspondence to Alex O. Holcombe.

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Holcombe, A., Cavanagh, P. Early binding of feature pairs for visual perception. Nat Neurosci 4, 127–128 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/83945

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