DOI 10.1007/s00426-005-0030-6 EDITORIAL

Our world consists of object and events. As an almost defining criterion of how an object is constituted, the features of an object are all attached to each other: the redness of the cherry is exactly where I find its roundness and the softness of its skin, and all these features are there at the same point in time. Things get a bit more complicated if we consider larger objects, like a sailing ship—where the whiteness may be restricted to the sail, and temporally extended events, where features may gradually change over time. But the basic organizing structure is always the same, namely, things that belong together share spatiotemporal coordinates. This observation may seem trivial, but it is in fact striking when one considers that our brain has a very different organizational structure. One important difference is that the brain codes the different features of an object or event in different modules: color is coded in color maps, aspects of shapes in shape maps, motion in motion maps, pitch in pitch maps, and so on (e.g., DeYoe & Van Essen, 1988; Schreiner, 1995). Some of these maps are spatially organized, and thus retain at least this aspect of how our world is organized, but the sheer multiplicity of representational maps demonstrates that properties that are perceived together in the world are not represented together in the brain. A second important difference concerns the temporal aspect of perception. The computation and transmission of different features within the same modality and in different modalities varies widely, so that the time at which a representational code is activated is an unreliable estimate of when the represented event occurred in the world (Zeki, 1993). Th