Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Visual mental imagery and visual memory appear to utilise similar brain networks. However, limited research has in-vestigated how similar the systems are in terms of capacity limits. Capacity limits of visual working memory (VWM)and visual short-term memory (VSTM) have been the focus of considerable research, but to our knowledge none has at-tempted to ascertain the number of objects that can be simultaneously imagined. This study aimed to provide estimatesof imagery capacity and explore how this relates to the capacity of visual memory. Participants completed three tasks thatexplored imagination, VWM and VSTM, respectively. Set size was manipulated similarly in each task enabling modellingof imagination and visual memory capacity. Capacity estimates were similar in the two visual memory tasks and higherthan that of imagination. The relations between these tasks are discussed alongside the theoretical implications about themechanisms underpinning imagery and visual memory.