Testing a relational account for visual working memory (2017-2020)

The present project aims to test whether Becker's relational theory of attention can explain visual working memory performance, which is the ability to remember visual items over brief time periods. According to the relational account, elementary features (e.g., colours) are not encoded independently of each other, but relative to other features in the context (e.g., as redder, larger, darker). Correspondingly, our ability to detect a change in a feature (e.g., colour) would strongly depend on the features in the context, and on whether the context remains constant or not. The present work will provide new insights into how features are represented in memory, and will allowing predicting, for the first time, which items will be remembered.