Currently it is acknowledged that the precision of representations in visual working memory depends on the number of items concurrently held in the memory (Bays & Husain,
2008; Wilken & Ma,
2004; Zhang & Luck,
2008); we can have a few highly precise representations or multiple representations with lower fidelity. Correspondingly, the memory capacity for complex objects is lower than for simple features due to increased information load (Alvarez & Cavanagh,
2004) or due to limited resolution of the memory slots (Awh, Barton, & Vogel,
2007). While the different views on visual working memory agree, with certain reservations, on the trade-off between the capacity and memory precision, there still is a debate on whether the working memory contains discrete (Awh, Barton, & Vogel,
2007; Anderson, Vogel, & Awh,
2011; Cowan & Rouder,
2009; Rouder et al.,
2008; Zhang & Luck,
2008) or continuous resources (Alvarez & Cavanagh,
2004; Bays & Husain,
2008,
2009; Bays, Catalao, & Husain,
2009; Huang,
2010; Wilken & Ma,
2004) for the short-term storage of information. The flexible resources models predict a continuous decrease in the precision of the representations as the number of items increases. The discrete-slots model (Zhang & Luck,
2008; slots + averaging) suggests that memory precision increases with a small number of items because multiple slots can be used to represent the same item, but when the number of items exceeds the number of memory slots, the precision reaches a plateau.