Contingency blindness: Location-identity binding mismatches obscure awareness of spatial contingencies and produce profound interference in visual working memory

The purpose of the present study was to highlight the role of location–identity binding mismatches in obscuring explicit awareness of a strong contingency. In a spatial-priming procedure, we introduced a high likelihood of location-repeat trials. Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b demonstrated that participants’ explicit awareness of this contingency was heavily influenced by the local match in location–identity bindings. In Experiment 3, we sought to determine why location–identity binding mismatches produce such low levels of contingency awareness. Our results suggest that binding mismatches can interfere substantially with visual-memory performance. We attribute the low levels of contingency awareness to participants’ inability to remember the critical location–identity binding in the prime on a trial-to-trial basis. These results imply a close interplay between object files and visual working memory.