10/2/25 Sean Polyn: The temporal structure of visual short-term memory
CCN brown bag
Sean Polyn, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology
Date: Thursday, October 2, 2025
Time: 12:10- 1:00pm
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
The temporal structure of visual short-term memory
A foundational proposal in theories of visual memory is that information must first be held in short-term storage in order for the system to create long-term memories. But what if that arrow is reversed? The Context Maintenance and Retrieval—Working Memory model (CMR-WM; Polyn & Woodman, in press) proposes that long-term memories begin to be formed as soon as environmental details are attended, and that performance limitations in visual working memory tasks reflect contextual targeting dynamics rather than the capacity limit of a short-term store. Whereas long-term memory effects in short-term memory tasks have often been cast as bleed-in from an independent memory system, CMR-WM provides a unitary system to account for short-term and long-term memory effects. Integrating contextual dynamics into a model of visual working memory provides new insight into the nature of interference in short-term visual memory tasks and allows the model to capture the temporal structure of visual experience as it unfolds in time.