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Working memory

The relational nature of visual working memory

Nature Reviews Psychology (2026)Cite this article

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Countless examples reveal that visual perception is inherently relational: what an object looks like depends on its surroundings. For instance, in the Ebbinghaus illusion, two identical circles can look different in size depending on whether they are surrounded by smaller or larger circles.

Visual perception shares many similarities with visual working memory — the system that temporarily retains visual information after it has disappeared from view. Both recruit visual cortex, show similar capacity limits and rely on common retinotopic representations. These parallels make it likely that relational effects similar to those observed in perception might also apply to working memory. Yet for a long time, visual working memory was treated as fundamentally different from vision in this respect.

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  • Trentin, C. T. et al. Action similarity warps visual feature space in working memory. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 121, e2413433121 (2024)

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  • Rovelli, C. Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Penguin, 2016)

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  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Cate Trentin

  2. Institute for Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Cate Trentin

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  1. Cate Trentin
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Correspondence to Cate Trentin.

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Trentin, C. The relational nature of visual working memory. Nat Rev Psychol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00543-4

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