Today afternoon at 1:30pm (CDT), my RA Kaira Shlipak will be presenting her blitz talk @wmsymposium.bsky.social on relationship between VWM of meaningful objects and fluid intelligence! www.wmsymposium.org

Working Memory Symposium

WMS will be back in 2026! July 14th-17th You can download the program here!

wmsymposium.org

Tomorrow morning at 11am I'll be presenting my talk at #VSS2026 titled "Semantic understanding, not just coherent object structure, strengthens visual working memory"! (Talk Room 2) See you there!

Hello to everyone coming to @vssmtg.bsky.social: Come see what our lab and collaborators have been working on this past year. - Lots of interesting new work on visual working memory, feature- and object-based attention, cross-modal attention, ensemble perception!

Saturday, May 16, 5:45pm in Talk Room 2, I'll be talking about a rich epistemic demonstration of how semantically-rich objects can scaffold our memory of meaningless surface features. w/ @yonghoonchung.bsky.social & @violastoermer.bsky.social

A multi-lab replication effort (@eegmanylabs.bsky.social) of the contralateral delay activity (CDA) has just been published online! In brief, the set-size effect appears to be robustly observed, but CDA correlation with VWM capacity is not reliably strong. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

VSS (@vssmtg.bsky.social) is coming up! Do you have an idea for a vision experiment but want to check you haven't missed anything? Looking for collaborators or relevant resources? Wanting to chat about a theory or model? Consider the pre-data poster session! www.visionsciences.org/pre-data-col...

New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects

Abstract. Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information. Contrary to the common assumption that the capacity of this system is fixed...

doi.org

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

🚨New paper altert🚨 As a synthesis of my PhD research, we revisited the prevailing assumption about the mechanisms underlying repetition learning, and re-evaluated these assumption in light of recent findings. Now out in Perspectives on Psychological Science: doi.org/10.1177/1745...

Make it your New Year resolution to add a #workingmemory dataset to OpenWMData so that we can curate our field's precious data, start testing theories and benchmarking models across datasets, conduct secondary analyses and meta-research using the data itself, and help me feel like I'm, like, alive.

OpenWMData

A collection of publicly available working memory datasets

williamngiam.github.io

Has anyone attended any pre-data-collection poster sessions (i.e., poster sessions where people present their plans for experiments before data collection in order to get feedback when it's most useful) at conferences other than VSS?

New paper with NicoleAnayaSosa and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in Perception! "Testing location invariance of the flashed face distortion effect" journals.sagepub.com/eprint/WVUFW...

Testing location invariance of the flashed face distortion effect - Yong Hoon Chung, Nicole C. Anaya Sosa, Viola S. Störmer, 2025

Spatially aligned faces presented in a continuous stream in the periphery appear distorted and grotesque. This flashed face distortion effect (“FFDE”) was first...

journals.sagepub.com

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be presenting my symposium talk at #ESCoP2025 titled "Meaningful and familiar stimuli support visual working memory for simple features"! See you there!

We are now recruiting STEM mentors for the 2025-2026 graduate school application cycle! ⏰ Mentor applications close on July 31st, 2025 ⏰ ✨ APPLY HERE: dashboard.project-short.com ✨ Questions? Email us: contact@project-short.com #gradschool #phd #phdapplication #gradadmissions

New paper with LaurenWilliams, @timbrady.bsky.social, and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JEP: General! "Limits of verbal labels in cognition: Category labels do not improve visual working memory performance for obfuscated objects" psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Today afternoon I’ll be presenting my poster at #vss2025 titled “Perceptual and conceptual contributions of the real-world object benefit in visual working memory: Is looking like an object good enough to enhance memory?” See you at Pavillion!

New paper with Kaira Shlipak and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in Journal of Memory and Language! “Fluid intelligence correlates with working memory capacity for both real-world objects and simple-feature stimuli” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fluid intelligence correlates with working memory capacity for both real-world objects and simple-feature stimuli

Previous research has shown that individual differences in visual working memory performance strongly correlate with measures of fluid intelligence. I…

sciencedirect.com

Excited to see everyone at #VSS2025 - Come check out what my lab has been up to over this past year:

Hello VSS friends! Want feedback on your current projects? Submissions for our pre data collection poster satellite are still open until tomorrow. More info here: www.visionsciences.org/2025-pre-dat... @vssmtg.bsky.social @shansmann-roth.bsky.social @willngiam.bsky.social @yonghoonchung.bsky.social

The deadline is coming up to present at the pre-data poster session at #VSS. It's the perfect venue for those who want to have a conversation about an idea or a topic (especially early-career researchers who may not have something in-the-works!). #visionscience www.visionsciences.org/2025-pre-dat...

New Preprint with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here we show increased neural delay activity associated with remembering features as part of real-world objects. 1/

Real-world objects scaffold visual working memory for features: Increased neural delay activity when colors are remembered as part of meaningful objects

Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information. While previous studies have postulated that the capacity of this system is fixed with...

biorxiv.org

Tomorrow morning I’ll be presenting my poster at CNS @cogneuronews.bsky.social B10: “Increased neural delay activity for simple features when they are remembered as part of real-world objects” Come chat with me about how semantic associations may improve feature working memory! #CNS2025

Presenting my poster @opam.bsky.social today 11:30am: “Can you remember them better because they are familiar or because they look real? Testing the contribution of object-ness in visual working memory with novel objects” See you all there!