ABSTRACT
Our mind is equipped with offline memory storage for visual information, known as visual long-term memory. Visual information stored in this memory storage can be retrieved to guide our behavior long after it is encoded. Although the capacity of visual long-term memory is virtually unlimited, not every piece of visual information we wish to encode is granted access to this storage. On the other hand, visual information that we wish not to remember can get stored against our will. In this chapter, we review recent studies that elucidated the mechanistic constraints and limited voluntary control that govern access to visual long-term memory. We conclude this chapter by proposing potentially fruitful directions to better understand and mitigate the limited control and access to this unlimited memory store.
