ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance2017
Accounting for stimulus-specific variation in precision reveals a discrete capacity limit in visual working memory.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
- The oblique effect in visual working memory is enhanced by distraction, regardless of tDCS manipulations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Learning-dependent modulation of working memory.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Perceptual confidence has near perfect access to the existence of discrete representations, but only weak access to precision.Cognition · 2026Article
- Goal-directed modulation of neural activity during working memory maintenance.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Low-level features predict perceived similarity for naturalistic images.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Representational geometry explains puzzling error distributions in behavioral tasks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Verbal Encoding Strategies in Visuo-Spatial Working Memory.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Sensory-memory interactions via modular structure explain errors in visual working memory.eLife · 2024Article
- Intrinsic functional networks for distinct sources of error in visual working memory.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Correlative comparison of visual working memory paradigms and associated models.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Color category and inter-item interaction influence color working memory codependently.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Repulsion bias is insensitive to spatial attention, yet expands during active working memory maintenance.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Mapping visual working memory models to a theoretical framework.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Geometry of visuospatial working memory information in miniature gaze patterns.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Corvids optimize working memory by categorizing continuous stimuli.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Working memory performance is tied to stimulus complexity.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Learning efficient representations of environmental priors in working memory.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- A spatially continuous diffusion model of visual working memory.Cognitive psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
If we view a visual scene that contains many objects, then momentarily close our eyes, some details persist while others seem to fade. Discrete models of visual working memory (VWM) assume that only a few items can be actively maintained in memory, beyond which pure guessing will emerge. Alternatively, continuous resource models assume that all items in a visual scene can be stored with some precision. Distinguishing between these competing models is challenging, however, as resource models that allow for stochastically variable precision (across items and trials) can produce error distributions that resemble random guessing behavior. Here, we evaluated the hypothesis that a major source of variability in VWM performance arises from systematic variation in precision across the stimuli themselves; such stimulus-specific variability can be incorporated into both discrete-capacity and variable-precision resource models. Participants viewed multiple oriented gratings, and then reported the orientation of a cued grating from memory. When modeling the overall distribution of VWM errors, we found that the variable-precision resource model outperformed the discrete model. However, VWM errors revealed a pronounced "oblique effect," with larger errors for oblique than cardinal orientations. After this source of variability was incorporated into both models, we found that the discrete model provided a better account of VWM errors. Our results demonstrate that variable precision across the stimulus space can lead to an unwarranted advantage for resource models that assume stochastically variable precision. When these deterministic sources are adequately modeled, human working memory performance reveals evidence of a discrete capacity limit. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.