Feature binding in object-file representations of multiple moving items

Maintenance of episodic representations by feature-location binding is important for visual cognition. It has been proposed that we can hold and update coherent episodic representations of up to four objects. This study investigated the dynamic maintenance of feature-location bindings with multiple objects. In a series of seven experiments, participants judged whether a sequence of rotating patterns of three or four colored disks contains any color switch between two disks. Color-switch detection is in general difficult, even when tracking of objects' motions is successful, suggesting that our ability for dynamic maintenance is limited. The performance improved when the interframe rotation angle became sufficiently small. Moreover, spatiotemporal predictability was necessary for this improvement, suggesting that the maintenance of multiple episodic representations is an interactive process between our prediction and sensory mechanisms.