Relational information in visual short-term memory: the structural gist.

Over the past 20 years, storage of visual items in visual short-term memory has been extensively studied by many research groups. In addition to questions concerning the format of object storage is a more global question that focuses on the organization of information in visual short-term memory. In a series of experiments we investigated how relations across visual items determined the accessibility of individual item information. This relational information seems to be very strong within the store devoted to each feature dimension. We also investigated the role of selective attention on the storage of relational information. The experiments suggest a broadening of the parallel store model of visual short-term memory proposed by M. E. Wheeler and A. M. Treisman (2002) to include the notion of what we call “structural gist.”