ArticlePsychological science2019
Working Memory Has Better Fidelity Than Long-Term Memory: The Fidelity Constraint Is Not a General Property of Memory After All.
Article in Psychological science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Discrimination of mnemonic similarity is associated with short-term and long-term memory precision.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Is Hey Jude in the right key? Cognitive components of absolute pitch memory.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Sustained Attention and Spatial Attention Distinctly Influence Long-term Memory Encoding.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- Theory of neural coding predicts an upper bound on estimates of memory variability.Psychological review · 2020Article
- Correlated Individual Differences in the Estimated Precision of Working Memory and Long-Term Memory: Commentary on the Study by Biderman, Luria, Teodorescu, Hajaj, and Goshen-Gottstein (2019).Psychological science · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How detailed are long-term-memory representations compared with working memory representations? Recent research has found an equal fidelity bound for both memory systems, suggesting a novel general constraint on memory. Here, we assessed the replicability of this discovery. Participants (total N = 72) were presented with colored real-life objects and were asked to recall the colors using a continuous color wheel. Deviations from study colors were modeled to generate two estimates of color memory: the variability of remembered colors-fidelity-and the probability of forgetting the color. Estimating model parameters using both maximum-likelihood estimation and Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we found that working memory had better fidelity than long-term memory (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, within each system, fidelity worsened as a function of time-correlated mechanisms (Experiments 2 and 3). We conclude that fidelity is subject to decline across and within memory systems. Thus, the justification for a general fidelity constraint in memory does not seem to be valid.
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Registered trials
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