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: [email protected]

#gradschool #phd #phdapplication #gradadmissions

And here is a preprint link: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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!

Overall, our results add to the emerging evidence that meaningful and familiar stimuli can enhance visual working memory processes and also show that remembering meaningful stimuli and simple features share core active cognitive processes.

Additionally, the meaningfulness benefits showed up even in the first five trials of the task in our results, showing how robust the effect is in visual working memory.

We also find that the amount of working memory increase individuals get from using meaningful stimuli also correlates with fluid intelligence scores, suggesting a link between meaningfulness benefit and fluid intelligence abilities.

In this paper we show that working memory performances for both real-world objects and colored circles reliably correlate with individual differences in fluid intelligence but not with crystallized intelligence measures.

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...

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...

Overall, our results show that working memory is shaped by the context at encoding. Meaningful context promotes stronger and more stable neural engagement during encoding and maintenance. This indicates that working memory processes are flexible, even with respect to a single feature dimension. 8/8

Interestingly, we also found a broad and large difference in non-lateralized ERP waveforms between the two conditions during both encoding and delay periods. While more research will be needed to fully understand this novel component, this appears to robustly distinguish the two types of stimuli. 7/

We also examined how stable the neural activity patterns are over time by adopting a cross-temporal pattern similarity analysis. The results showed that neural stability arises more rapidly when remembering features of real-world objects. 6/

Our results showed enlarged and more spread-out CDA when colors were encoded and remembered as parts of real-world objects, suggesting expansion in involvement of active working memory storage. 5/

In the experiment, participants viewed and remembered colors of either intact real-world objects or scrambled objects. Critically, only colors were relevant features in the task and the identities of objects were not asked throughout the experiment. 4/

Mainly, we are looking at CDA (contralateral delay activity), an ERP component during the maintenance period of visual working memory tasks well known to be correlated with engagement of active working memory storage. 3/

Our previous works have shown enhanced working memory performance for visual features when they’re remembered as parts of meaningful objects. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... Here we investigate the underlying neural activities behind this performance boost. 2/

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/

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!