ABSTRACT
Our experience of the visual world is driven by external stimulus input combined with acquired lifetime knowledge. Understanding of how this is accomplished is spread across multiple lines of research ranging from visual psychophysics through visual perception and attention, visual short-term memory, mental imagery, object recognition, episodic visual memories, and semantic visual knowledge. Visuospatial working memory might be seen as a possible interface between these diverse topic areas; it is not quite visual attention because it deals with current visuospatial mental representations of the world not direct stimulus input, but it is fed by the products of visual attention. It is not episodic or semantic memory, but its contents are influenced by prior experiences at least as much as they are by visual perception. As such visuospatial working memory supports online cognition in that it holds, manipulates, and updates our current interpretation of the external visual world as well as holding and manipulating temporary reactivations of past experiences (e.g., Byrne, Becker, & Burgess, 2007; Logie & van der Meulen, 2009; van der Meulen, Logie, & Della Sala, 2009; Wolbers, Hegarty, Büchel, & Loomis, 2008). The properties of manipulation and updating here are crucial, because it is through manipulation of our current mental representations that visuospatial working memory can generate novel representations to support problem solving and creative thinking, navigation, planning future actions, and learning (see reviews in Cornoldi, Logie, Brandimonte, Kaufmann, & Reisberg, 1996; Helstrup & Logie, 1999; Logie, 2003; Roskos-Ewoldsen, Intons-Peterson, & Anderson, 1993). This mental workspace could be seen as the virtual world of our experience, while the external world is real in the sense that it is relatively stable and predictable most of the time, and it also acts as the external input for the diverse virtual mental worlds across individuals.
