ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition2023
Systematic differences in visual working memory performance are not caused by differences in working memory storage.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perceptual confidence has near perfect access to the existence of discrete representations, but only weak access to precision.Cognition · 2026Article
- Zooming in on what counts as core and auxiliary: A case study on recognition models of visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- On the functional independence of numerical acuity and visual working memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
People vary in their performance on visual working memory tasks, and these individual differences covary with a wide range of higher-level cognitive processes including fluid intelligence. Performance also varies across study displays, purportedly driven by both low- and higher-level processes. Understanding what causes these sources of systematic variability has been crucial for developing theories of working memory. However, here we find that all such variability in performance on a test of visual working memory can be accounted for by concurrent variability in visual iconic memory: A person with relatively high working memory capacity will have high iconic memory capacity, and a particularly easy working memory display will also be easy under iconic memory conditions. These results are supported by a nonparametric factor analysis and hierarchical Bayesian model comparison. In a second experiment the relationship between iconic and working memory holds even when they are measured with substantially different experimental paradigms, and a third experiment suggests that the relationship between tests of iconic and working memory is driven by mechanisms other than iconic or working memory storage, such as variation in perceptual or attentional processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
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.