Working memory and the source of color categories in macaques

Poster Presentation 43.451: Monday, May 22, 2023, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm, Pavilion
Session: Visual Working Memory: Space, features, objects

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Daniel Garside1 (), Hannah Selwyn1, Neha Sriram1, Alexis Green1, Josh Fuller-Deets1, Bevil Conway1; 1National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health

The target confusability competition (TCC) model (Schurgin, Wixted & Brady 2020) provides a framework for analyzing working memory behavior to uncover the underlying mechanisms, not only for working memory but also for perceptual and cognitive biases.  We collected ~220K trials from 4 macaques performing a recall task, and fit a TCC model to the data. We find that previously identified biases (Chang, Selwyn, et al. 2021) arise from two distinct mechanisms: the bias towards cool colors derives from inhomogeneity in the behavioral colorspace, whereas the bias towards warm colors appears to be a higher level cognitive bias.  Previous work (Schurgin, Wixted & Brady 2020) presented color memory as a model system that is representative of working more generally. Our macaque data mirrors human data, suggesting that macaque working memory operates in a similar way to human working memory.