Binding object features to locations: Does the “spatial congruency bias” update with object movement?

Abstract

One of the fundamental challenges of visual cognition is how our visual systems combine information about an object's features with its spatial location. A recent phenomenon related to object-location binding, the "spatial congruency bias," revealed that two objects are more likely to be perceived as having the same identity or features if they appear in the same spatial location, versus if the second object appears in a different location. The spatial congruency bias suggests that irrelevant location information is automatically encoded with and bound to other object properties, biasing perceptual judgments. Here we further explored this new phenomenon and its role in object-location binding by asking what happens when an object moves to a new location: Is the spatial congruency bias sensitive to spatiotemporal contiguity cues, or does it remain linked to the original object location? Across four experiments, we found that the spatial congruency bias remained strongly linked to the original object location. However, under certain circumstances-for instance, when the first object paused and remained visible for a brief time after the movement-the congruency bias was found at both the original location and the updated location. These data suggest that the spatial congruency bias is based more on low-level visual information than on spatiotemporal contiguity cues, and reflects a type of object-location binding that is primarily tied to the original object location and that may only update to the object's new location if there is time for the features to be re-encoded and rebound following the movement.