ArticleAttention, perception & psychophysics2024
Mixing and mingling in visual working memory: Inter-item competition is feature-specific during encoding and feature-general during maintenance.
Article in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Selective removal of visual working memory items at test.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Colors, characters, locations, and shapes: The capacity of working memory for multiple, dissimilar sets of items.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Clashing memories in working memory modulate serial dependence.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Similarity-driven compression during encoding supports biased but more precise working memory.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- When similarity is less disruptive: feature-sharing distractors in visual working memory under diffuse attention.Frontiers in cognition · 2026Article
- Modality-, feature-, and strategy-dependent organization of low-level working memory.Journal of vision · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Visual working memory (WM) is a central cognitive ability but is capacity-limited due to competition between remembered items. Understanding whether inter-item competition depends on the similarity of the features being remembered has important implications for determining if competition occurs in sensory or post-sensory stages of processing. Experiment 1 compared the precision of WM across homogeneous displays, where items belonged to the same feature type (e.g., colorful circles), and heterogeneous displays (e.g., colorful circles and oriented bars). Performance was better for heterogeneous displays, suggesting a feature-specific component of interference. However, Experiment 2 used a retro-cueing task to isolate encoding from online maintenance and revealed that inter-item competition during storage was not feature-specific. The data support recent models of WM in which inter-item interference - and hence capacity limits in WM - occurs in higher-order structures that receive convergent input from a diverse array of feature-specific representations.
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Registered trials
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