Little Support for Discrete Item Limits in Visual Working Memory
Klaus Oberauer · 2022 · Psychological Science
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
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
Abstract by Klaus Oberauer, Psychological Science (2022) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: OpenAlex · DOI 10.1177/09567976211068045