Meaningfulness and familiarity expand visual working memory capacity

Visual working memory is traditionally studied using abstract, meaningless stimuli. While studies using such simplified stimuli have been insightful in understanding the mechanisms of visual working memory, they also potentially undermine our ability to understand how people encode and store conceptually rich and meaningful stimuli in the real world. Recent studies demonstrate that meaningful and familiar visual stimuli that connect to existing knowledge are better remembered compared to abstract colors or shapes, indicating that meaning can unlock additional working memory capacity. These findings challenge current models of visual working memory and suggest that its capacity is not fixed but depends on the type of information that is being remembered, and in particular how that information connects to pre-existing knowledge.