Recalling a single object: going beyond the capacity debate Rakesh Sengupta Center for Creative Cognition, SR Engineering College, Warangal, India Christelle M. Lewis Center for Creative Cognition, SR Engineering College, Warangal, India Raju S. Bapi Cognitive Science Lab, International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad, India Working memory is now established as a limited capacity system. The debate regarding work- ing memory has been largely between slots and resource based models. The resource model suggests that as the number of items increases, precision of recall decreases because neural resources are dynamically allocate to all the objects needed for task. Slot model on the other hand implies that an item is stored either with the highest precision or not at all. If both these models stand true then quality of memory performance would be near perfect for a single object. However, that may not be the case. In the current work, we investigated recall accuracy for feature(s) of a single object in three successive experiments. In all three experiments, the memory array consisted of a single colored oriented short line presented a short distance away from the center of the display for 1 sec. We probed recall of features from the set of color, loca- tion, orientation, and size. In experiment 1 number of recall question varied between 1 − 4 with the order randomized in each trial. In experiment 2 we chose to probe only two feature recall questions, whereas only one recall question was probed for the third experiment. In experiment 3 we varied the delay before the recall probe between 1 and 2 s. The recall response for each feature was mapped on to a continuous variable. Subjects used a color wheel to respond to color, on-screen mouse click to indicate center of the line location, click away from the center to indicate size, and a mouse click to the periphery of centered circle to indicate orientation with the slant of the resulting radial line. We calculated z-scores of errors for each feature for every subject separately. In experiment 1 that for color, location, and size the errors increase significantly with the position of the questions asked. In experiment 2, the errors increased significantly between questions for color and location (but not for orientation and size). In experiment 3, we did not see any significant increase in error with recall probe delay. Overall run-time for each trial was within 10 secs, well within the limits of operation of working mem- ory. This drop in performance poses questions for memory mechanisms proposed by slot and resource models as both would predict near-perfect recall within the time-period for the trials. Introduction Following the conceptualization and seminal contribution by Baddeley and Miller, working memory has entered the lexicon of cognitive psychology as one of the key executive functions of the brain. We invoke the concept of working memory to understand how brain manages to perform tasks that are not resolved by the current percept alone and requires manipulation and storage of information temporarily. The major theoretical frameworks currently available for work- ing memory in general are influenced by largely the follow- ing categories (note that not all the following are mutually incompatible) • Multi-component model of working memory where a central executive directs a phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer for maintenance and manipu- lation of temporary task related information(Baddeley, 2003, 2012). • Working memory as a maintenance of representations from long term memory that are activated within the focus of attention (Cowan, 2001). • Working memory as a limited capacity maintenance system for discrete fixed-resolution items needed for task completion (Luck and Vogel, 1997; Zhang and Luck, 2008). • Working memory as a limited resource distributed dy- namically and flexibly over all the items that need to be main- tained in memory (Ma et al., 2014). Last couple of decades has seen a narrowing of the focus of working memory research towards psychological and neuro- physiological studies of capacity (for an extensive review see Cowan (2012) and Luck and Vogel (2013)).The research on the capacity of visual working memory (VWM) has largely focused on a slot based approach (e.g. fixed slots (Luck and Vogel, 1997)), or approaches with a non-specific neural ar- chitecture (e.g. dynamic resource allocation with varied pre- (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted March 8, 2020. . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.951921 doi: bioRxiv preprint