Contrary to early proposals stating that we always store bound object features in visual working memory, more recent work has suggested that we can inhibit the encoding, or consolidation, of irrelevant features of objects into visual working memory. However, a number of theoretical proposals suggest that spatial location is a special feature of an object that might be obligatorily bound to objects stored in visual working memory. In this study, I used a masking paradigm to measure the efficiency of encoding into visual working memory while subjects were tasked with remembering the location, color, or both of these features of the objects. The measures of consolidation efficiency indicate that spatial location is not encoded into visual working memory unless it is relevant for the task at hand. Thus, the present experiments show that we can control which features of an object are selectively stored in working memory, including spatial location, a feature thought to be immune to such filtering.

与早期的提议相反，我们总是将绑定的对象特征存储在视觉工作记忆中，与此相反，最近的工作表明我们可以禁止将无关的对象编码或合并到视觉工作记忆中。但是，许多理论建议表明，空间位置是对象的一项特殊功能，可能会强制性地绑定到存储在视觉工作内存中的对象。在这项研究中，我使用掩盖范例来衡量编码到视觉工作记忆中的效率，而受试者被要求记住物体的位置，颜色或这两个特征。整合效率的度量表明，除非空间位置与手头的任务相关，否则空间位置不会被编码到视觉工作记忆中。因此，