Illusory conjunctions inside and outside the focus of attention.

This article addresses 2 questions that arise from the finding that visual scenes are first parsed into visual features: (a) the accumulation of location information about objects during their recognition and (b) the mechanism for the binding of the visual features. The results of experiments suggest that features inside the focus of attention are integrated by an expandable focal attention mechanism that conjoins all features that appear inside its focus. Visual features outside the focus of attention may be registered with coarse location information prior to their integration.