Functional roles of memory for feature-location binding in event perception: Investigation with spatiotemporal visual search

In a dynamic environment full of degraded or missing perceptual information, memory might facilitate or even substitute efficiently for perception. We tested this idea with a spatiotemporal search task that required participants to search for a target defined by a binding of two features across a single object, across two points in time. Eight coloured bars moved horizontally until they became partially occluded behind squares. Before the tail of the bar becomes occluded, the head of the bar reemerged with a possibly different colour. Observers were precued a subset of the bars, and judged the presence of a colour changing target among the precued set. A series of three experiments revealed that memory can substitute for perception only for one object, and that the preview of colour-location binding does not facilitate perceptual processing. Cueing location and object features do not have additive effects. Binding memory may have highly limited capacity in substitution and facilitation of perception.