Abstract
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.