Sensory working memory consists of the short-term storage of sensory stimuli to guide behaviour. There is increasing evidence that elemental sensory dimensions — such as object motion in the visual system or the frequency of a sound in the auditory system — are stored by segregated feature-selective systems that include not only the prefrontal and parietal cortex, but also areas of sensory cortex that carry out relatively early stages of processing. These circuits seem to have a dual function: precise sensory encoding and short-term storage of this information. New results provide insights into how activity in these circuits represents the remembered sensory stimuli.