Visual Working Memory

Visual working memory (VWM) is the short-term store that keeps a small amount of visual information active and available after the original stimulus is gone. Luck and Vogel's (1997) change-detection experiments established that VWM has a hard capacity limit of roughly three to four integrated objects, and critically, that limit applies to whole objects rather than individual features: an object combining color, shape, and orientation costs the same one slot as an object with a single feature, as long as the features are bound into one unit. This finding, and the change-detection paradigm used to produce it, remains the standard method for measuring VWM capacity today.

Reference: Luck & Vogel, 1997. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. Holding a five-enemy minimap snapshot in mind for the second or two it takes to look back down at your crosshair.
2. Remembering which ability icons just went on cooldown after a single fast glance at the HUD.
3. Retaining the layout of a briefly-flashed loadout or shop screen without needing to reopen it.

The Memory module's grid recall trial type is a direct, if brief-duration, visual working memory task: a spatial pattern is shown, then removed, and the player reproduces it from memory after a short delay, testing exactly the capacity-limited storage system Luck and Vogel described.