and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Portions of this work were presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, the 2019 Context and Episodic Memory Symposium (CEMS), and at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology.

Foundation Grant 100014_165591. We thank Nathalie Rieser for her help with data collection. We also thank Robert M. Nosofsky and an anonymous reviewer for their many valuable comments. All materials, data, and modeling scripts are available on the

Mixed-state models of visual working memory assume discrete mental states ofknowing and guessing; information is either represented in memory or not at all. At the core of most conceptualizations of mixed-state models is the notion of conditional independence, that is, the probability of a process taking place when a given memory state is reached is independent of the probability of reaching said state. For example, the probability of committing a memory-based error being conditionally independent of the probability of a memory-based response being made. We test this assumption using an extended recognition-memory paradigm that allows for second choices, along with a task-difficulty manipulation. The second choices obtained through this paradigm provide testable predictions for conditional independence that are violated in the reported data. Overall, our results indicate that the probabilities of memory-based responses and of memory-based errors go hand in hand.