Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The representation of visual features is investigated by examining the types of information that are encoded at the feature level which are used for feature binding. Features are often assumed to be bound together by virtue of their common location, but the current study shows that shared context, as well as location, acts to constrain the feature binding process and the formation of illusory conjunctions. T w o different sorts of context manipulations are reported In one manipulation, the context of each item in the display is established by flanking bars, and binding errors are examined as a function of this shared context Also examined is a more global context manipulation in which the items presented form either a word or nonword Both sorts of contexts affect feature binding, although in different ways. Finally, some of the computational difficulties in implementing a feature representation that encodes context are considered.