10.17863/CAM.4473
Schneegans, Sebastian
0000-0002-1246-2259
Bays, Paul
0000-0003-4684-4893
No fixed item limit in visuospatial working memory
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
2016
working memory
resource
spatial
variability
Bayesian
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
2016-09-20
2016-09-20
2016-08-06
en
Article
0010-9452
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/260241
1973-8102
10.1016/j.cortex.2016.07.021
Attribution 4.0 International
Attribution 4.0 International
Attribution 4.0 International
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Investigations of working memory capacity in the visual domain have converged on the concept of a limited supply of a representational medium, flexibly distributed between objects. Current debate centers on whether this medium is continuous, or quantized into 2 or 3 memory “slots”. The latter model makes the strong prediction that, if an item in memory is probed, behavioral parameters will plateau when the number of items is the same or more than the number of slots. Here we examine short-term memory for object location using a two-dimensional pointing task. We show that recall variability for items in memory increases monotonically from 1 to 8 items. Using a novel method to isolate only those trials on which a participant correctly identifies the target, we show that response latency also increases monotonically from 1 to 8 items. We argue that both these findings are incompatible with a quantized model.
Wellcome Trust (Grant ID: 106926)
This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2016.07.021
WELLCOME TRUST
106926/Z/15/Z