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Everything or nothing, depending on the enquiry and its intent.
I'll try to pull a hurdle off the track before anyone feels challenged to jump it, or raise it, in the interest of semantics. The whole point of accurately and sensitively "seeing" an object in nature is -- not for the window shopper, no, but for the artist, yes -- to transfer the impressions from that activity or exercise onto paper or canvas or scratchboard, into clay or plaster or marble. If we're "just looking" and no more, then memory has no useful role to play. If we wish to capture the visual impressions we've sensed from our encounter with the objects in nature, so that we can turn and replicate those impressions with some degree of integrity and accuracy, we are necessarily using memory -- in this case, short-term memory.
(The point here isn't at all about long-term memory, or recollections, or imagining birth experiences or such things. Long-term memory is clouded with all manner of interpretation, preconception, cultural molding, and both loss and creation of details. The issue here is NOT "memory vs. observation". The dynamic in play is observation, recording of the visual data, and transfer of that information to the artist's working surface or material. And that transfer absolutely requires the operation of memory, albeit short-term.)
"Memory training," "memory exercises," "memory work" -- however labeled -- is a staple of rigorous training in drawing, particularly figure drawing. It often takes the form of simply viewing, say, irregular polygons for 30 seconds, putting the sample away, and trying to immediately recreate it from memory. First efforts are usually discouraging, but the facility develops quite rapidly, and soon the student artist gains confidence in his or her ability to see an object in nature -- to pay attention to it, to make spatial and relational judgments as between its parts -- and to quickly turn attention to the easel or armature and replicate the information just captured in memory. There's no other way to make that transfer, short of projectors or other mechanical or optical devices that leave the artist out of the process.
Later memory training might involve viewing a model in the life room for, say, three minutes, then having that model leave the stand, whereupon the students are challenged to draw or paint what they've just observed. Another exercise is to view a color sample for one minute, put it away and try to accurately replicate the hue and value of that sample on your canvas. Over time, the sample and your efforts will become closer and closer to a match, which will mean that more and more of what you put down on the paper or canvas, whether in the studio or in the field, will be accurate the first time.
That's kind of a short version of an answer that could go on endlessly (and I'm the guy to do that!). Aristotle was trying to get at the nature of memory quite a long time ago (I forget exactly how long ago), so interest in the psychophysiological processes has been keen for a while.
I'm admittedly at a loss to quite understand the thesis or objection in opposition to this. I don't know how else the human artist collects and transfers visual information other than through the memory processes.
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