ABSTRACT
Remembering what we have just seen and retrieving visual details of past experiences underlies our every waking moment as well as being crucial for successful performance of a vast range of everyday tasks. The capacity for doing so is often attributed to temporary memory functions that can retain recently presented features of objects, where those objects are in relation to each other and to ourselves, and the movement sequences and trajectories for dynamic visual arrays. These same temporary memory functions are considered to support the manipulation of the information that they hold as well as to act as vehicles for the formation of integrated representations and mental images derived from stored knowledge and from clusters of stimulus features. Inevitably, cognitive psychology hosts a range of conceptual models devised to account for this temporary visual memory (for reviews see, e.g., Conway, Jarrold, Kane, Miyake, & Towse, 2007; Logie & D’Esposito, 2007; Miyake & Shah, 1999; Osaka, Logie, & D’Esposito, 2007; Shah & Miyake, 2005). In this chapter, we focus on a conceptual model that views visual and spatial temporary memory functions as being supported by a combination of domain-specifi c and general-purpose resources within a multicomponent working memory system as originally proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and subsequently modifi ed by Baddeley and Logie (1999; Logie, 1995, 2003). A schematic diagram of the Logie (1995, 2003) framework for visuospatial working memory that will serve as the basis for discussion in this chapter is shown in Figure 1.1.
