Real-world objects are not stored in holistic representations in visual working memory.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Visual working memory (VWM) is crucial for temporarily storing information.
• Binding errors, or feature misattributions, are known in VWM for simple objects.
• It remains unclear if binding errors occur with complex, real-world objects with meaningful features.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if binding errors occur for real-world objects in VWM.
• To determine if meaningful feature-to-object associations are susceptible to VWM binding errors.
• To examine the impact of location changes on object-feature binding in VWM.

Main Methods:

• Participants viewed four real-world objects from two categories, each with distinct states (e.g., open/closed).
• Memory for object exemplars and their associated states was tested after a delay.
• Experiment 3 introduced location swaps at test to assess the effect of spatial updates.

Main Results:

• Memory for individual object features and states was accurate.
• Significant decrements in memory for object-state combinations indicated binding errors.
• Location swaps at test increased overall error rates, impairing object and feature representations.

Conclusions:

• Real-world object features are not perfectly bound in visual working memory.
• Meaningful associations are vulnerable to binding errors, similar to arbitrary features.
• Spatial updating processes negatively impact the integrity of object-feature representations in VWM.