Little Support for Discrete Item Limits in Visual Working Memory

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Abstract

Some theorists argue that working memory is limited to a discrete number of items and that additional items are not encoded at all. Adam et al. (2017) presented evidence supporting this hypothesis: Participants reproduced visual features of up to six items in a self-chosen order. After the third or fourth response, error distributions were indistinguishable from guessing. I present four experiments with young adults (each N = 24) reexamining this finding. Experiment 1 presented items slowly and sequentially. Experiment 2 presented them simultaneously but longer than in the experiments of Adam et al. Experiments 3 and 4 exactly replicated one original experiment of Adam et al. All four experiments failed to replicate the evidence for guessing-like error distributions. Modeling data from individuals revealed a mixture of some who do and others who do not produce guessing-like distributions. This heterogeneity increases the credibility of an alternative to the item-limit hypothesis: Some individuals decide to guess on hard trials even when they have weak information in memory.

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Oberauer, K. (2022). Little Support for Discrete Item Limits in Visual Working Memory. Psychological Science, 33(7), 1128–1142. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211068045

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