Integrating “What” and “Where”
Sebastian Schneegans, John Peter Spencer, Gregor Schöner · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
This chapter presents a model of working memory and change detection in visual scenes that addresses the binding problem: When memorizing a group of objects, each with a location and multiple surface features, how are the properties of each individual object bound together and kept separate from the properties of other objects? In the proposed architecture a stack of feature maps forms the neural substrate for scene working memory. Binding makes use of a spatial dimension shared by all feature maps. The operations of attentional selection and space-feature integration act jointly to memorize multiple objects in a bound fashion and detect changes in visual scenes. The need for attentional selection in some task implies sequential processing of individual items, whereas in other tasks, items can be processed in parallel. This aspect of the model’s behavior provides qualitative predictions about human performance.