Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW
Volume 121, Issue 1, Pages 124-149Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/a0035234
Keywords
working memory; short-term memory; model comparison; capacity; resource models
Categories
Funding
- National Eye Institute [R01EY020958]
- Army Research Office [W911NF-12-1-0262]
- [NIH-R01MH077105]
- NATIONAL EYE INSTITUTE [R01EY020958] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH [R01MH087214, R01MH077105] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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Three questions have been prominent in the study of visual working memory limitations: (a) What is the nature of mnemonic precision (e. g., quantized or continuous)? (b) How many items are remembered? (c) To what extent do spatial binding errors account for working memory failures? Modeling studies have typically focused on comparing possible answers to a single one of these questions, even though the result of such a comparison might depend on the assumed answers to both others. Here, we consider every possible combination of previously proposed answers to the individual questions. Each model is then a point in a 3-factor model space containing a total of 32 models, of which only 6 have been tested previously. We compare all models on data from 10 delayed-estimation experiments from 6 laboratories (for a total of 164 subjects and 131,452 trials). Consistently across experiments, we find that (a) mnemonic precision is not quantized but continuous and not equal but variable across items and trials; (b) the number of remembered items is likely to be variable across trials, with a mean of 6.4 in the best model (median across subjects); (c) spatial binding errors occur but explain only a small fraction of responses (16.5% at set size 8 in the best model). We find strong evidence against all 6 documented models. Our results demonstrate the value of factorial model comparison in working memory.
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