Abstract
We investigated whether perceptual organization can influence the detection of feature changes from those stored in visual working memory. The stimulus display consisted of six or eight single-colored shapes or single-colored bars for manipulating perceptual grouping by color similarity, shape similarity or orientation similarity. A feature change was either inside or outside of the perceptual group. The results showed that orientation or shape grouping did not influence the detection of feature changes, reflecting weak organization effects. In contrast, color grouping influenced change detection of the less salient features. Detecting a shape or orientation change inside a color group was more difficult than detecting it outside the color group. If visual working memory is object-based, the results suggest that change signals from an object's less salient feature can be overshadowed by the perceptual grouping based on its more salient feature.