Features, as well as space and time, guide object persistence

Abstract

What role do surface features (e.g., color) play in the establishment and maintenance of episodic representations of objects (object files)? Mitroff and Alvarez (2007) showed that stimuli that were linked by a continuous spatiotemporal history yielded object-specific preview benefits--a standard index of object files-whereas stimuli linked only by shared surface features did not. Here, it is shown that abruptly changing the features of an object that has been established on the basis of spatiotemporal history can disrupt object-specific preview benefits (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, under some conditions, feature match alone can give rise to the preview benefits (Experiment 3). These results indicate that surface features, as well as spatiotemporal factors, play an important role in establishing and maintaining episodic object representations.

Figure 1.

Illustrations of the conditions of the three experiments and the mean response time (RT) and error rates (ER) for each of the two match conditions. The final column shows the congruency effect (i.e., the difference between the incongruent match and the congruent match trials). *Statistically reliable effect (α = .05).