An embodied account of visual working memory

Abstract

Traditional models of visual memory rely solely on internal memory and ignore our reliance on the information that is physically present in the external visual world. Experiments on visual working memory generally use paradigms that are designed to maximally load internal memory storage, although these situations do not necessarily translate to the actual use of visual working memory in daily life. Here, I discuss an embodied view of visual memory in which there is a continuous decision about which information to internalize and which information to leave in the external world for (possible) access later in time. In this view, the known limited capacity of visual working memory is not a problem in daily life, as the external world typically remains readily available and can be accessed relatively easily by executing eye movements to relevant locations.