The advanced publication of Anna’s new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition is now available. Here, it was shown that ordinal and relational transformations in the spatial or temporal structure of object configurations impair memory performance, whereas global transformations do not. Therefore, inter item relations such as the distances between items and their order, rather than absolute placements in space or time, appear to be what define both spatial and temporal reference frames in VWM. These results extend prior findings for the spatial domain and highlight functional parallels between the spatial and temporal dimensions in VWM.

Citation: Heuer, A., & Rolfs, M. (2022). Temporal and spatial reference frames in visual working memory are defined by ordinal and relational properties. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.