The colorful memory

We are living in a colorful world. When we perceive colors in daily life, how do we store them in memory so that we can retrieve them later? What influences the different strategies that working memory adopts to store this information? How does this information interact with attention? In this thesis, we discuss two main topics: First, what determines how visual (color) information is stored as different types of representation, and why? Second, how does attention interact with VWM in different processes? We used various methods, including behavioral measures, computational modeling, eye-tracking, and pupillometry to answer these questions. Our results showed that whether and to which extent visual information is stored in highly-precise, continuous representations, or less-precise, categorical representations depends on memory load. Specifically, VWM becomes more reliant on categorical representations with increasing memory load. Crucially, our results confirmed the assumption that only a single item can be actively maintained inside the focus of attention, which is stored as a continuous representation in VWM, likely because of the large amount of mental effort it requires to maintain a continuous representation. In turn, attention is also guided by VWM representations. Our results showed that in naturalistic environments, a color that is maintained in VWM attracts attention to items that match this color in a search task. Moreover, our results confirmed the assumption that more than one VWM representation can guide attention at the same time during visual search. Overall, the current thesis provided an integrated perspective to understand the mechanisms in VWM storage, as well as the dynamics between VWM and attention in visual processing.