Ongoing discussions on the nature of storage in visual working memory have mostly focused on 2 theoretical accounts: On one hand we have a discrete-state account, postulating that information in working memory is supported with high fidelity for a limited number of discrete items by a given number of "slots," with no information being…

Infants' ability to perform visual short-term memory (VSTM) tasks develops rapidly between 6 and 8 months. Here we tested the hypothesis that infants' VSTM performance is influenced by their ability to individuate simultaneously presented objects. We used a "one-shot change detection task" to ask whether 6-month-old infants (N = 47)…

We report an experiment designed to provide a qualitative contrast between knowledge-limited versions of mixed-state and variable-resources (VR) models of visual change detection. The key data pattern is that observers often respond "same" on big-change trials, while simultaneously being able to discriminate between same and small-change…

In this study, 6-month-old infants' visual working memory for a static feature (color) and a dynamic feature (rotational motion) was compared. Comparing infants' use of different features can only be done properly if experimental manipulations to those features are equally salient (Kaldy & Blaser, 2009; Kaldy, Blaser, & Leslie,…

When remembering a real-world scene, people encode both detailed information about specific objects and higher order information like the overall gist of the scene. However, formal models of change detection, like those used to estimate visual working memory capacity, assume observers encode only a simple memory representation that includes no…

By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is…