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Visual memory

Scaling up behavioural studies of visual memory

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 672–673 (2023)Cite this article

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A century of experiments on human visual memory have catalogued the many determinants of what people remember about their visual environments. In a massive experimental study of visual memory, Huang leverages mobile gaming to collect a dataset of 35 million behavioural responses that reveals how the mechanisms of visual spatial memory fit together.

Visual memory supports the ability to remember visual stimuli and is critical to everyday activities such as driving a car or recognizing a familiar face3. Psychophysicists and cognitive psychologists have conducted thousands of carefully controlled laboratory experiments to identify the factors that determine what people remember about their visual environment3. Yet in most of these experiments, only a handful of factors can be studied at a time, which leaves many questions about how all the factors fit together unanswered. Developing a unified model of visual working memory that accurately predicts what will be remembered of an arbitrary visual stimulus remains a grand challenge of the cognitive sciences.

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  1. Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Jordan W. Suchow

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  1. Jordan W. Suchow
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Correspondence to Jordan W. Suchow.

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Suchow, J.W. Scaling up behavioural studies of visual memory. Nat Hum Behav 7, 672–673 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01565-1

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