Visual Memory Test

Visual spatial memory is the part of working memory that holds and manipulates visual and spatial information for a short time. You use it to remember where you parked, find your way around a new city, or picture how a room would look with the furniture moved. It corresponds to the visuospatial sketchpad in Baddeley's working memory model.

The average person can hold about 4 to 5 visual items in working memory at once. This visual working memory capacity is fairly consistent between people, though it depends on how complex the items are. Practice can make you more efficient at encoding visual information, even if the underlying capacity stays fairly stable.

Visual working memory capacity is one of the strongest predictors of fluid intelligence. People who can hold more visual items at once tend to score higher on IQ tests, especially non-verbal reasoning tasks like Raven's Progressive Matrices. Working memory capacity appears to be a basic building block of higher-order thinking.

Neuroimaging shows that visual working memory tasks activate the prefrontal cortex and parietal regions. Efficient communication between these areas is linked to both greater working memory capacity and higher intelligence scores.