An adaptive perspective on visual working memory distortions

When holding multiple items in visual working memory, representations of individual items are often attracted to, or repelled from, each other. While this is empirically well-established, existing frameworks do not account for both types of distortions, which appear to be in opposition. Here, we demonstrate that both types of memory distortion may confer functional benefits under different circumstances. When there are many items to remember and subjects are near their capacity to accurately remember each item individually, memories for each item become more similar (attraction). However, when remembering smaller sets of highly similar but discernible items, memory for each item becomes more distinct (repulsion), possibly to support better discrimination. Importantly, this repulsion grows stronger with longer delays, suggesting that it dynamically evolves in memory and is not just a differentiation process that occurs during encoding. Furthermore, both attraction and repulsion occur even in tasks designed to mitigate response bias concerns, suggesting they are genuine changes in memory representations. Together, these results are in line with the theory that attraction biases act to stabilize memory signals by capitalizing on information about an entire group of items, whereas repulsion biases reflect a tradeoff between maintaining accurate but distinct representations. Both biases suggest that human memory systems may sacrifice veridical representations in favor of representations that better support specific behavioral goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).