Abstract：The basic unit of object representation in visual working memory (VWM) is a fundamental yet unresolved question. Recently, researchers have proposed that individual-feature and integrated-object representations co-exist in VWM. However, no study has directly examined this hypothesis. The current study explored this issue in three experiments, wherein we presented participants with three two-featured bars (color and orientation), and required them to memorize the orientations and ignore the colors in a change-detection task. Experiments 1 and 2 examined whether independent orientation representations exist in VWM by exploring the similarity effect, which takes place on feature representations and shows better performance in memorizing similar features than in dissimilar ones. Experiments 1 and 2 observed the similarity effect when only the orientations were memorized, although the irrelevant colors were also extracted into VWM. Moreover, the similarity effect of orientation was not weakened by the added colors, suggesting that orientation representations exist in VWM. Experiment 3 examined whether there were integrated objects containing both color and orientation in VWM, by manipulating the color-orientation binding while the orientation was kept constant. We found that the change of binding dramatically impaired the memorization of orientation. Taken together, these results support a hybrid view for the building blocks of VWM and suggest that integrated objects and independent features co-exist in VWM.
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