Swap errors in spatial working memory are guesses.

ABSTRACT: In typical visual working memory tasks, participants report the color of a previously studied item at some probed location. Alternatively, in some recent studies, a color is probed and participants must report the item's location. There is a surprising difference between these tasks: in location reports participants almost never guess randomly as they do when reporting color, but often incorrectly report the locations of non-probed items. This finding has been taken as evidence for feature binding errors in memory, and evidence against discrete capacity models, which predict that pure guessing should occur. We test an alternative possibility: that non-target responses are guesses, but intelligent ones. In particular, when asked to report the location of an item for which participants have

SUBMITTER: Pratte MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7093911 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature