Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM)

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) maintains visual information in mind for short periods of time (up to approximately 30 seconds). This process is thought to be important for linking perception with higher cognitive functions, such as planning our future actions. For example, when playing a sports game like soccer, we need to maintain information in VSTM, such as the position of each player on the court, before we decide our next move. However, as it so often evidenced in sports games, we often fail to correctly and accurately maintain information in VSTM or when we do, this affects our ability to focus attention or accurately perceive other incoming information. Our research explores failures of VSTM as well as interactions between VSTM and other cognitive processes such as attention and perception using behavioural experiments, neuroimaging (fMRI, VBM), and brain stimulation (TMS).