VISUAL WORKING MEMORY FOR CATEGORIES AND EXEMPLARS OF OBJECTS E. Darcy Burgund,* Lisa C. Elo,† & Chad J. Marsolek,† *Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO †Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN We examined visual working memory for unfamiliar objects. In each trial, a sample object was presented briefly in the central visual field, and after a blank display, a probe object was presented briefly in the left or right visual field. In one task, subjects judged whether the probe object belonged to the same abstract category as the sample object, and in the other task they judged whether the probe object was the same specific exemplar as the sample object. Abstract-category judgments were more accurate when the probe was presented directly to the left hemisphere than to the right, and specific-exemplar judgments were more accurate when the probe was presented directly to the right hemisphere than to the left.