Color working memory has been the central focus in an ongoing and vigorous debate concerning the structure and limits of visual working memory. Initially, these limits were hypothesized to be discrete in nature, restricting the individual number of objects a person could store at once (Cowan,
2001; Luck & Vogel,
1997). More recently, the focus of much research has shifted to the quality of visual working memory—the precision with which an observer can store and report the specific value of an object feature. This shift in focus emerged to a large extent with the introduction of the delayed estimation paradigm (Wilken & Ma,
2004; Zhang & Luck,
2008). In this paradigm, an observer attempts to store the features of some number of objects and is then asked to identify the feature value of a probed item on a continuous scale. Because of the intuitive nature of continuous differences between colors, color working memory has enjoyed the lion's share of research with this paradigm (
Figure 1; e.g., Anderson & Awh,
2012; Bays, Catalao, & Husain,
2009; Bays, Wu, & Husain,
2011; Emrich & Ferber,
2012; Fougnie & Alvarez,
2011; Fougnie, Asplund, & Marois,
2010; Fougnie, Suchow, & Alvarez,
2012; Gold et al.,
2010; van den Berg, Shin, Chou, George, & Ma,
2012; Wilken & Ma,
2004; Zhang & Luck,
2008,
2009,
2011). While the debate concerning the limits of color working memory continues, there appears to be wide-ranging consensus that the working memory representation of color is noisy or probabilistic—that is, varying in fidelity—and that some of this variability is imposed by the structure of visual working memory.