ArticleCognitive psychology2022
Swap errors in visual working memory are fully explained by cue-feature variability.
Article in Cognitive psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Impact of Dimension Switching on Visual Short-Term Memory.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Double-decision Response Time Models of Recall and Recognition Support Resource Accounts of Visual Working Memory.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Alpha phase coding supports feature binding during working memory maintenance.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Visual memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
- Item-based Parsing of Dynamic Scenes in a Combined Attentional Tracking and Working Memory Task.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Presenting Features Audiovisually Improves Working Memory for Bindings.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- Features without their locations in visual working memory: Evidence from change-detection tasks.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- A computational approach to the N-back task.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Dissecting the components of error in analogue report tasks.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Correlative comparison of visual working memory paradigms and associated models.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The neural basis of swap errors in working memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Article
- Mapping visual working memory models to a theoretical framework.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Stochastic attractor models of visual working memory.PloS one · 2024Article
- Probabilistic and rich individual working memories revealed by a betting game.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A mechanistic insight into sources of error of visual working memory in multiple sclerosis.eLife · 2023Article
- The neural basis of swap errors in working memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Redundant representations are required to disambiguate simultaneously presented complex stimuli.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- There Is no Theory-Free Measure of "Swaps" in Visual Working Memory Experiments.Computational brain & behavior · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
In cue-based recall from working memory, incorrectly reporting features of an uncued item may be referred to as a "swap" error. One account of these errors ascribes them to variability in memory for the cue features leading to erroneous selection of a non-target item, especially if it is similar to the target in the cue-feature dimension. However, alternative accounts of swap errors include cue-independent misbinding, and strategic guessing when the cued item is not in memory. Here we investigated the cause of swap errors by manipulating the variability with which either cue or report features (orientations in Exp 1; motion directions in Exp 2) were encoded. We found that swap errors increased with increasing variability in memory for the cue features, and their changing frequency could be quantitatively predicted based on recall variability when the same feature was used for report. These results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that swaps are a strategic response to forgotten items, and suggest that swap errors could be wholly accounted for by confusions due to cue-dimension variability. In a third experiment we examined whether spatial configuration of memory arrays in tasks with spatial cueing has an influence on swap error frequency. We observed a specific tendency to make swap errors to non-targets located precisely opposite to the cued location, suggesting that stimulus positions are partially encoded in a non-metric format.
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