Spatial resolution fundamentally limits any image representation. While this limit has been extensively investigated for perceptual representations by assessing how neighboring flankers degrade the perception of a peripheral target with visual crowding, the corresponding limit for representations held in visual working memory (VWM) is unknown. Here we evoked crowding in VWM and directly compared its resolution to that of perception. Remarkably, the spatial resolution of VWM proved no worse than that of perception. However, mixture modeling of errors due to crowding revealed the qualitatively distinct nature of these representations. Perceptual crowding errors arose from both increased imprecision in target representations and substitution of flankers for targets. By contrast, VWM crowding errors exclusively arose from substitutions, suggesting that VWM transforms analog perceptual representations into discrete items. Thus, while perception and VWM share a common resolution limit, exceeding this limit reveals distinct mechanisms for perceiving images and holding them in mind.
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