Beyond the Curve: Visual Working Memory and the Illusion of Understanding

Good fits of models can produce an "illusion of understanding" when the models lack grounded theoretical interpretations. This is characterized by the recent claims surrounding the good fit of the Target Confusability Competition (TCC) model of visual working memory (VWM). Despite that TCC appears to assume no capacity limits in VWM, we recently found that TCC can outperform capacity-limit models even when capacity limits are the ground truth, reflecting TCC's strong flexibility. This flexibility renders the model unfalsifiable in practice and obscures its mechanistic interpretation. We further argue that the distinction between memory failure and degraded memory precision, captured by the capacity-limit models (e.g., the Mixture model), are supported by converging empirical evidence, highlighting the necessity of empirically testable model predictions for achieving genuine understandings of mechanisms.