Maintenance and transformation of episodic representations are important for visual cognition. It has been proposed that we can hold and update coherent episodic representations of up to 4 objects. This study investigated the dynamic maintenance of feature-location bindings with multiple objects. Observers saw a pattern of 4 colored circles rotating smoothly with a constant velocity behind an occluder. They judged whether the sequence contained any color switch during occlusion. Although pattern motion was completely predictable and slow, color switch detection performance was a monotonically decreasing function of angular velocity of the pattern, suggesting that our ability of dynamic maintenance is limited to static situations. Moreover, beyond 200-ms occlusion, the occlusion duration affected the irregularity detection little, suggesting that the angular velocity, not the amount of spatial displacement during occlusion, is the critical determinant of our maintenance of episodic representations.
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