Human working memory is resource limited, and understanding the nature of these limits is a major goal of working memory research (Baddeley,
2003; Brady, Konkle, & Alvarez,
2011; Luck & Vogel,
2013; Ma, Husain, & Bays,
2014). Quantitatively exploring human memory performance by measuring the limits on capacity and precision provides important clues about the underlying neural mechanisms of memory storage. One measured limit has been characterized as the number of simple objects (about three to four; Cowan,
2001) that can be stored in visual working memory.
1 Furthermore, when a task involves attending to particular objects in a scene, it can happen that task-irrelevant objects are not remembered at all, even when they are salient (Rock, Linnett, Grant, & Mack,
1992; Simons & Chabris,
1999). When task-irrelevant objects do attract attention, this often comes at the expense of maintaining task-relevant information (Asplund, Todd, Snyder, Gilbert, & Marois,
2010; Horstmann,
2005,
2006; Yin et al.,
2012). Additionally, information that was once task relevant does not necessarily remain in memory (Chen & Wyble,
2015; Triesch, Ballard, Hayhoe, & Sullivan,
2003). These findings demonstrate natural strategies for efficiently using limited memory resources.