Visual short-term memory capacity predicts the "bandwidth" of visual long-term memory encoding
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Updated: Oct 2, 2026

Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
Keisuke Fukuda1, Edward K Vogel2
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Rd., Mississauga, ON, L5L 1C6, Canada. keisuke.fukuda@utoronto.ca.
Abstract:
We are capable of storing a virtually infinite amount of visual information in visual long-term memory (VLTM) storage. At the same time, the amount of visual information we can encode and maintain in visual short-term memory (VSTM) at a given time is severely limited. How do these two memory systems interact to accumulate vast amount of VLTM? In this series of experiments, we exploited interindividual and intraindividual differences VSTM capacity to examine the direct involvement of VSTM in determining the encoding rate (or "bandwidth") of VLTM. Here, we found that the amount of visual information encoded into VSTM at a given moment (i.e., VSTM capacity), but neither the maintenance duration nor the test process, predicts the effective encoding "bandwidth" of VLTM.
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