Perceptual similarity judgments do not predict the distribution of errors in working memory

Population coding models provide a quantitative account of visual working memory (VWM) retrieval errors with a plausible link to the response characteristics of sensory neurons. Recent work has provided an important new perspective linking population coding to variables of signal detection, including d-prime, and put forward a new hypothesis: that the distribution of recall errors on, e.g., a color wheel, is a consequence of the psychological similarity between points in that stimulus space, such that the exponential-like psychophysical distance scaling function can fulfil the role of population tuning and obviate the need to fit a tuning width parameter to recall data. Using four different visual feature spaces, we measured psychophysical similarity and memory errors in the same participants. Our results revealed strong evidence for a common source of variability affecting similarity judgments and recall estimates, but did not support any consistent relationship between psychophysical similarity functions and VWM errors. At the group level, the responsiveness functions obtained from the psychophysical similarity task diverged strongly from those that provided the best fit to working memory errors. At the individual level, we found convincing evidence against an association between observed and best-fitting similarity functions. Finally, our results show that the newly proposed exponential-like responsiveness function has in general no advantage over the canonical von Mises (circular normal) function assumed by previous population coding models.