Temporal Binding and Segmentation in Visual Search: A Computational Neuroscience Analysis (original) (raw)

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

■ Human visual search operates not only over space but also over time, as old items remain in the visual field and new items appear. Preview search (where one set of distractors appears before the onset of a second set) has been used as a paradigm to study search over time and space [Watson, D. G., & Humphreys, G. W. Visual marking: Prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects. Psychological Review, 104, 90-122, 1997], with participants showing efficient search when old distractors can be ignored and new targets prioritized. The benefits of preview search are lost, however, if a temporal gap is introduced between a first presentation of the old items and the representation of all the items in the search display [Kunar, M. A., Humphreys, G. W., & Smith, K. J. History matters: The preview benefit in search is not onset capture. Psychological Science, 14, 181-185, 2003a], consistent with the old items being bound by temporal onset to the new stimuli. This effect of temporal binding can be eliminated if the old items reappear briefly before the new items, indicating also a role for the memory of the old items. Here we simulate these effects of temporal coding in search using the spiking search over time and space model