ArticleAttention, perception & psychophysics2023
Distinguishing guesses from fuzzy memories: Further evidence for item limits in visual working memory.
Article in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Double-decision Response Time Models of Recall and Recognition Support Resource Accounts of Visual Working Memory.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Cue-driven attentional guidance nearly eliminates salience effects in working memory.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2026Article
- Contributions from Long-Term Memory Explain Superior Visual Working Memory Performance with Meaningful Objects.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural evidence for modality-independent storage in working memory.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Contributions from Long-Term Memory Explain Superior Visual Working Memory Performance with Meaningful Objects.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Restoring a top-down control assumption: Salience effects in working memory are overcome with time.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- A tutorial for estimating Bayesian hierarchical mixture models for visual working memory tasks: Introducing the Bayesian Measurement Modeling (bmm) package for R.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Zooming in on what counts as core and auxiliary: A case study on recognition models of visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Visual working memory models of delayed estimation do not generalize to whole-report tasks.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Object-based encoding constrains storage in visual working memory.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Working Memory Constrains Long-Term Memory in Children and Adults: Memory of Objects and Bindings.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
- Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
There is consistent debate over whether capacity in working memory (WM) is subject to an item limit, or whether an unlimited number of items can be held in this online memory system. The item limit hypothesis clearly predicts guessing responses when capacity is exceeded, and proponents of this view have highlighted evidence for guessing in visual working memory tasks. Nevertheless, various models that deny item limits can explain the same empirical patterns by asserting extremely low fidelity representations that cannot be distinguished from guesses. To address this ambiguity, we employed a task for which guess responses elicited a qualitatively distinct pattern from low fidelity memories. Inspired by work from Rouder et al. (2014), we employed an orientation WM task that required subjects to recall the precise orientation of each of six memoranda presented 1 s earlier. The orientation stimuli were created by rotating the position of a "clock hand" inside a circular region that was demarcated by four colored quadrants. Critically, when observers guess with these stimuli, the distribution of responses is biased towards the center of these quadrants, creating a "banded" pattern that cannot be explained by a low precision memory. We confirmed the presence of this guessing pattern using formal model comparisons, and we show that the prevalence of this pattern matches observers' own reports of when they thought they were guessing. Thus, these findings provide further evidence for guessing behaviors predicted by item limit models of WM capacity.
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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.