The Importance of Being Relevant

This review aims at an understanding of the binding process by synthesizing the extant perspectives regarding binding. It begins with a consideration of the biological explanations of binding, viz., conjunctive coding, synchrony, and reentrant mechanisms. Thereafter binding is reviewed as a psychological process guided by top-down signals. The stages and types of binding proposed by various researchers are discussed in this section. The next section introduces Working Memory (WM) as the executive directing the top-down signals. After that it is described how WM works by selecting relevant sensory input, followed by a detailed consideration of the debate regarding objects vs. features with the conclusion that relevance is the key factor determining what is processed. The next section considers other factors affecting the selection of relevant input. Then, we shift focus to describe what happens to irrelevant input – whether it is discarded at the outset or is gradually inhibited, and whether inhibition is a perceptual or post-perceptual process. The concluding section describes the process of binding as currently understood on the basis of the literature included in the review. To summarize, it appears that initially the “object” is conceptualized as an instantaneous bundle of all features. However, only relevant features of stimuli are gradually integrated to form a stable representation of the object. Concomitantly, irrelevant features are removed from the object representations. Empirical evidence suggests that the inhibition of irrelevant features occurs over time and is presumably a process within WM.