A mighty tool not only in perception: Figure-ground mechanisms control binding and retrieval alike

Stimulus and response features are linked together into an event file when a response is made towards a stimulus. If some or all linked features repeat, the whole event file (including the previous response) is retrieved, thereby affecting current performance (as measured in so-called binding effects). Applying the figure-ground segmentation principle to such action control experiments, previous research showed that only stimulus features that have a figure-like character led to binding effects, while features in the background did not. Against the background of recent theorizing, integration and retrieval are discussed as separate processes that independently contribute to binding effects (BRAC framework). Thus, previous research did not specify whether figure-ground manipulations exert their modulating influence on integration and/or retrieval. We tested this in three experiments. Participants worked through a sequential distractor-response binding (DRB) task, allowing measurement of binding effects between responses and distractor (color) features. Importantly, we manipulated whether the distractor color was presented as a background feature or as a figure feature. In contrast to previous experiments, we applied this manipulation only to prime displays (Experiment 1), only to probe display (Experiment 2), or varied the figure-ground manipulation orthogonally for primes and probes (Experiment 3). Together the results of all three experiments suggest that figure-ground segmentation affects DRB effects on top of encoding specificity, and that especially the retrieval process is affected by this manipulation. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-022-02511-5.