Visual working memory's pointer system: Past, present, and future

In our everchanging environment, the online representations of visual working memory (VWM) have an extremely important role, as they can be modified to reflect changes in the items that are being represented, which requires some way of accessing the appropriate representation. This access is at the heart of VWM's pointer system, an indexing of specific representations via a one-to-one mapping between VWM and objects in the environment. Here, we first review classic findings leading to the development of this notion of VWM-pointers, with a special emphasis on the theoretical distinction between the indexes and the representational content. We then describe a recently established approach for studying VWM's pointer system, which focuses on directly manipulating the number of pointers and their validity. Specifically, when the mapping between an item and its corresponding VWM representation is invalidated (e.g., when an object is abruptly replaced by another one), the representation becomes inaccessible and cannot be updated. Instead, VWM resets by removing the unmapped representation, creating novel representations and allocating their pointers. Resetting has unique neural and behavioral signatures, which were successfully used for studying VWM's pointer system, by identifying the underlying requirements for its ongoing function. We present several important lines of research employing this approach and discuss key findings regarding diverse issues such as pointer assignment, VWM chunking, and intuitive physical expectations. We end by proposing promising directions for future work targeting VWM's pointer system, with the potential to uncover currently unknown aspects of this central cognitive mechanism.