Toward ecologically realistic theories in visual short-term memory research

Recent evidence from neuroimaging and psychophysics suggests common neural and representational substrates for visual perception and visual short-term memory (VSTM). Visual perception is adapted to a rich set of statistical regularities present in the natural visual environment. Common neural and representational substrates for visual perception and VSTM suggest that VSTM is adapted to these same statistical regularities too. This article discusses how the study of VSTM can be extended to stimuli that are ecologically more realistic than those commonly used in standard VSTM experiments and what the implications of such an extension could be for our current view of VSTM. We advocate for the development of unified models of visual perception and VSTM—probabilistic and hierarchical in nature—incorporating prior knowledge of natural scene statistics.