Структура единиц хранения информации в зрительной рабочей памятиThe Structure of Visual Working Memory Units

The dissertation presents a collection of three articles on the general issue of the representational format in visual working memory. There is a big debate on the question: what are units of visual working memory? We found that not objects or features are visual working memory units but hierarchically organized features bundles (Markov, Tiurina, & Utochkin, 2019). Another study demonstrated that it could also be applied to real-world objects, which representations in visual working memory are not totally holistic (Markov, Utochkin, & Brady, 2021). Finally, we showed that the retrieval of information from visual working memory relies on noisy familiarity signals and highly depends on the task (Markov & Utochkin, 2022). Thus, overall, our findings suggest that visual working memory representations are flexible, hierarchical, and highly dependent on the current task.