Visual Working Memory refers to the short-term storage and manipulation of information that is of current relevance.  For instance, the mental juggling of features (color, shape, size, texture) that accompanies determining whether an object under consideration is the same as one that was seen a moment ago.  Infants can successfully make such judgments.  This line of research seeks to determine which features an infant relies on most to make such old-new judgments.  Are infants most likely to notice the presentation of a novel object if it differs in color from the hidden object?  Size?  Shape?  A critical pre-condition of such research is that such changes in to-be-remembered objects have been calibrated to be of equal ‘magnitude’, so that the changes themselves have equal visual salience.

Related publications:

papers

Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E., & Leslie, A., (2006). A new method for calibrating perceptual salience across dimensions in infants: the case of color vs. luminance.  Developmental Science, 9:5, 482–489

presentations

Niederhoefer, V. & Blaser, E. (2006). The functional units of visual working memory: Objects or Locations? The Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), Sarasota, FL

Kaldy, Z. & Blaser, E. (2005). Visual salience relations reflect perceptual development in 5- and 6-month-old infants. The Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), Atlanta, GA

Kaldy, Z., & Blaser, E. (2004). Iso-salient color and luminance information in visual working memory. European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Budapest, Hungary

Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E., & Leslie, A. (2004). Iso-salient color and luminance information in object identification. International Conference on Infancy Studies (ICIS), Chicago, IL