In the early stages of visual processing, objects and scenes are represented by neurons with small visual receptive fields. Each neuron provides information about local features of a scene, but to describe a scene in terms of objects requires that these features be combined. Objects can cover wide areas of visual space and be partially occluded by other objects, so the problem of binding the separate representations of parts into coherent wholes is not a simple one. This “binding problem” has received considerable attention.