Accessibility Limits Recall from Visual Working Memory

©American Psychological Association, 2017. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000387In this paper, 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 (Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008; Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009). 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