Mechanisms of target selection and feature binding in visual object recognition

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The human brain's remarkable capabilities are often attributed to its highly parallel organization of processes. However, the integration of these distributed processes into a coherent consciousness, known as the "binding problem," remains a contentious topic in cognitive neuroscience. This thesis seeks to advance both methodological and empirical understanding of the formalized properties of various integration mechanisms for visual featural information, relevant in both early and late processing stages of the visual system. It emphasizes the development of mathematical methods that utilize behavioral reaction time data to distinguish between different variants of integration mechanisms, particularly within the visual search paradigm. A modified visual search paradigm is employed, incorporating feature change asynchronies to temporally separate featural manipulations in stimulus presentation. This approach addresses current research on pre-attentive feature integration. Through a series of experiments, the study explores recent findings regarding the temporal organization of feature integration and binding processes. The investigation focuses on how processing delays between dimension-specific featural information—such as color, motion, or orientation—may contribute to reported temporal misbindings in the literature.