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Feature Binding in Visual Working Memory

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Object Recognition, Attention, and Action
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Abstract

Our visual world contains numerous objects. An important function of the visual system is to recognize an object by comparing perceptual and memory representations. Although we seldom have any problems in recognizing natural objects, which promotes the belief that object recognition is a quite simple process of matching perceptual and memory representations, recognition does in fact involve extremely complicated visual processing. The fact that objects are almost never presented in isolation illustrates the complexity and difficulty of object recognition. The cluttered nature of our visual environment poses an object segmentation problem (including figure/ground segregation problem), which itself is quite difficult. Even if one can successfully segment a set of objects, there is another problem for the visual system to solve: the so-called binding problem. If there are multiple objects, each of which has its own feature values such as shape, color, size, and so on, then how does the visual system properly maintain the correct correspondences of these features? This chapter focuses on this binding problem in both object recognition and visual working memory.

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Saiki, J. (2007). Feature Binding in Visual Working Memory. In: Osaka, N., Rentschler, I., Biederman, I. (eds) Object Recognition, Attention, and Action. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-73019-4_12

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