What limits visual long-term memory?

In visual working memory and visual attention, processing and/or remembering one item largely comes at the expense of all the other items (e.g., there is a ‘resource’ limit). By contrast, when we encode a new object in long-term memory, it does not seem to come directly at the expense of the other items in memory: Remembering the clothes your child is wearing today does not automatically squeeze out your memory of the food on your child’s breakfast plate. Yet at the same time, we do not perfectly or even partially remember the visual details of everything we encounter, or even everything we actively attend to and encode into long-term memory. So what determines which items survive in visual long-term memory and how precisely their visual features are remembered? In this talk, I’ll discuss several experiments detailing both perceptual constraints on visual long-term memory storage for visual features and the role of interference in limiting long-term memory for visual objects. I’ll suggest there is a rich interplay between perception and concepts in visual long-term memory, and that therefore long-term memory visual objects can be a helpful case study for vision scientists in understanding the structure of visual representations in general.