Lack of colour integration in visual short-term memory binding

General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Abstract Bicoloured objects are retained in visual short-term memory (VSTM) less efficiently than unicoloured objects. This is unlike shape-colour combinations whose retention in VSTM does not differ from that observed for shapes only. It is debated whether this is due to a lack of colour integration and whether this may reflect the function of separate memory mechanisms. Participants judged whether the colours of bicoloured objects (each with an External and an Internal colour) were the same or different across two consecutive screens. Colours had to be remembered either individually or combined. In Experiment 1, External colours in the combined colours condition were remembered better than the Internal colours and both were performed worse than the individual colours condition. The lack of colour integration observed in Experiment 1 was further supported by a reduced capacity of VSTM to retain colour combinations relative to individual colours (Experiment 2). An additional account was found in Experiment 3 which showed spared colour-colour binding in the presence of impaired shape-colour binding in a brain damaged patient, thus suggesting that these two memory mechanisms are different.