Abstract
Working memory and its capacity limits significantly affect wide range of cognitive abilities, but the mechanisms underlying these limits have recently become controversial. Some researchers have proposed a limited set of discrete, fixed-resolution representations, whereas others have proposed that working memory consists of a pool of resources that can be flexibly allocated such that the more items that are held in memory, the less precisely each can be recalled. To test these models, we used biological motion of point-light walkers as stimuli because such discrepancies may be caused by specificity of the items to be stored. We found that the data were consistent with both models depending on manners of stimulus presentation in our paradigm. This result suggests that memory representation is capable of changing its behavior in different experimental conditions and so that the two models above are not mutually exclusive.
