Sequential encoding paradigm reliably captures the individual differences from a simultaneous visual working memory task.

Converging behavioral and neural evidence have suggested that visual stimuli could be attached to existing visual working memory sequentially in time. However, whether individual differences in sequential visual working memory paradigm are similar to those measured by the classical simultaneous change detection paradigm remain unknown. Here, we first show that sequentially presented visual stimuli exhibit similar working memory capacity bottlenecks as previous research using simultaneously presented items. We further reveal that within the same subject, the accuracy and capacity estimates using sequential and simultaneous paradigm were comparable across four different set sizes. Also, we discover that the individual differences measured by the sequential paradigm were highly correlated to those by the simultaneous paradigm within the same subject across all four set sizes of interest. Finally, we find that in a larger sample of subjects (n = 200), the variance and higher-order statistics were similar for sequential and simultaneous paradigms with set size of 6. Collectively, these findings indicate that individual differences measured by the sequential presentation of visual items rely on the similar working memory resources as those by the simultaneous form of presentation.