Selection can be performed effectively without temporal binding, but could be even more effective with it

Abstract

Experiments using spatial cues and spatial probes provide strong evidence for an attention mechanism that chooses a location and selects all information at that location. This selection process can work very quickly; so quickly that selection probably begins before segmentation and grouping. It can be implemented in a neural network simply and efficiently without temporal binding. In conjunction with this spatial attention, however, temporal binding can potentially enhance visual selection in complex scenes. First, it would allow a target object to be selected without also selecting a superimposed distractor. Second, it could maintain representations of objects after attention has moved to another object. Third, it could allow multiple parts of an object or scene to be selected, segmented, and analysed simultaneously. Thus, temporal synchrony should be more likely to appear during tasks with overlapping targets and distractors, and tasks that require that multiple objects or multipart objects be analysed and remembered simultaneously.