title: Accessibility limits recall from visual working memory.
abstract: In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response error in these tasks has been largely studied with respect to failures of encoding and maintenance; however, the retrieval operations used in these tasks remain poorly understood. By varying the number and type of object features provided as a cue in a visual delayed-estimation paradigm, we directly assess the nature of retrieval errors in delayed estimation from VWM. Our results demonstrate that providing additional object features in a single cue reliably improves recall, largely by reducing swap, or misbinding, responses. In addition, performance simulations using the binding pool model (Swan & Wyble, 2014) were able to mimic this pattern of performance across a large span of parameter combinations, demonstrating that the binding pool provides a possible mechanism underlying this pattern of results that is not merely a symptom of one particular parametrization. We conclude that accessing visual working memory is a noisy process, and can lead to errors over and above those of encoding and maintenance limitations. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rajsic
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University.
authors.forename: Garrett
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Swan
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Queen's University.
authors.forename: Daryl E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto.
authors.forename: Jay
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pratt
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011581:Psychological Tests