Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Existing knowledge shapes and distorts our memories, serv-ing as a prior for newly encoded information. Here, we in-vestigate the role of stable long-term priors (e.g. categoricalknowledge) in conjunction with priors arising from recentlyencountered information (e.g. ’serial dependence’) in visualworking memory for color. We use an iterated reproductionparadigm to allow a model-free assessment of the role of suchpriors. In Experiment 1, we find that participants’ reports re-liably converge to certain areas of color space, but that thisconvergence is largely distinct for different individuals, sug-gesting responses are biased by more than just shared categoryknowledge. In Experiment 2, we explicitly manipulate trialn-1 and find recent history plays a major role in participants’reports. Thus, we find that both global prior knowledge and re-cent trial information have biasing influences on visual work-ing memory, demonstrating an important role for both short-and long-term priors in actively maintained information.