Fig. 5. A probabilistic model of three sources of error in subjects’ responses.

Subject responses on the memory task were decomposed into three separate components, illustrated by the shaded regions in (B–D): a circular Gaussian distribution of responses centered on the orientation value of the target (B), circular Gaussian distributions with the same width centered on each non-target orientation value, corresponding to misbinding errors (C), and a uniform distribution, capturing random responses unrelated to any of the sample orientations (D). The variability in recall of each item’s orientation was governed by κ, the concentration parameter of the circular Gaussian (von Mises) distributions (A).