Coordinating the interaction between past and present: Visual working memory for feature bindings overwritten by subsequent action to matching features

The object-file framework forwarded by Kaheman, Treisman, and Gibbs (1992) has been enormously influential in our understanding of how the visual system links together prior visual content with a current input. Although this framework was initially developed to account for the perceptual benefits associated with feature conjunction repetitions, the present series of experiments examines how the core processes of this framework may also help explain behavior in tasks that require explicit remembering of visual information over the short term. Building off our previous work (Fiacconi & Milliken, 2012, 2013), here we introduce a procedure that affords the opportunity to examine the contributions of object-file review processes to both speeded performance and visual short-term memory (VWM) within the same task. Across two experiments we demonstrate a novel coupling between memory accuracy and speeded performance, such that the conditions that promote faster performance also tend to produce better memory, and vice versa. These findings are discussed in relation to the object-file framework and suggest that the object-file review processes known to guide behavior in speeded performance tasks may also have important mnemonic consequences. Together, these findings unite two lines of research to which Anne Treisman made indelible contributions.