Geoffrey Woodman¹, Sean Polyn¹; ¹Vanderbilt University

The study of visual working memory and visual long-term memory diverged decades ago, resulting in views about the diagnostic nature of certain measures that might not be valid. For example, in the study of visual working memory, it is viewed as critical to show a capacity limit in storage as a way of demonstrating that we are measuring the limited capacity visual working memory store and not the unlimited capacity visual long-term memory store. Although this is sound logic, it remains to be seen whether several of the hallmarks of working memory might already fall out of existing models of human long-term memory. Here we show that the precision and set size effects that we visual working memory researchers often use to validate our assumption that we are studying visual working memory are also observed as a natural result of the dynamics of contextual models of long-term memory storage and retrieval. We discuss how the situation motivates re-examining unified models of human memory, paired with multi-modal empirical studies that target key questions about the nature of visual working memory and long-term memory.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-2147064) and the National Eye Institute (T32-EY007135).