COVER ILLUSTRATION Distinct neural substrate for visual short-term memory (VSTM) of actions. Converging evidence from two fMRI experiments demonstrated specialized neural substrates, i.e., the bilateral middle temporal cortex (MT, pink area) for the maintenance of actions but not agents or spatial locations in VSTM. With increasing working memory load of actions, the MT also showed increased functional connectivity with the domain-general areas, including the middle frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule (purple areas). These results support the “core knowledge” theory which posits activation as one of the core systems of human visual cognition, as well as the domain-specific and domain-general architectures of VSTM.