Does motor noise contaminate estimates of the precision of visual working memory?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The continuous-report task, in which subjects report the colour of a visual working memory representation by clicking on a colour wheel, has become the gold standard for measuring the precision of representations stored in visual working memory. This task requires fine motor control, typically with a mouse, but the precision of responses have been interpreted as being entirely due to the precision of the memory representations. Here we tested the possibility that motor noise contaminates our estimates in the continuous-report task by simply asking subjects to complete the task using either their dominant or non-dominant hand on different blocks of trials. We found that subjects took longer with their non-dominant hand, but this did not affect the precision of their responses. Our findings suggest that this commonly used task to study visual memory may be relatively immune from contamination by motor noise at the output stage.