"What did you eat for dinner one week ago today? Chances are, you can’t quite recall. But for at least a short while after your meal, you knew exactly what you ate, and could easily remember what was on your plate in great detail. What happened to your memory between then and now? Did it slowly fade away? Or did it vanish, all at once?" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory. Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see. Just as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension." - Maitani

"In a recent review, researchers at Harvard and MIT argue that the critical factor is how meaningful the remembered images are—whether the content of the images you see connects to pre-existing knowledge about them. In the Zhang & Luck experiment, you try to remember meaningless, unrelated colors, and so no connection with stored knowledge is made; it’s as if the white board is scrubbed clean before you get a chance to copy the scribbles into your notebook. But in the Konkle et al. experiment, you see images of recognizable scenes that you already have meaningful knowledge about—such as where the roller coaster is likely to be located relative to the ground. This prior knowledge changes how these images are processed, allowing thousands of them to be transferred from the whiteboard of short-term memory into the bank vault of long-term memory, where they are stored with remarkable detail." - Maitani

because it's subjective; I wrote an ammmazzzing essay on this, I should forward it your way - sofarsoShawn

You should forward it, Shawn. :-) - Maitani