By the request of the authors, the following two research articles will be retracted from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience : 1. Anderson, D. E., Ester, E. F., Klee, D., Vogel, E. K., & Awh, E. (2014). Electrophysiological evidence for failures of item individuation in crowded visual displays. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 26(10), 2298– 2309. https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00649 . 2. Anderson, D. E., Bell, T. A., & Awh, E. (2012). Polymorphisms in the 5-HTTLPR gene mediate storage capacity of visual working memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 24(5), 1069–1076. https://dx.doi. org/10.1162/jocn_a_00207 . On August 1, 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced a settlement agreement with David E. Anderson, the Respondent ( http://ori.hhs.gov/content/ case-summary-anderson-david ). On the basis of the Respondent’s admission and an analysis by the University of Oregon, ORI concluded that the Respondent had engaged in research misconduct by falsifying and/or fabricating data in four publications. Those publications were retracted immediately after the release of the ORI findings. Since that time, additional problems have been discovered with Article 1 above. Data points shown in Figure 8 were removed without justification and in contradiction to the analytic approach described in the methods and results. In light of this discovery and of the previous ORI findings, authors Bell and Awh no longer have confidence in the integrity of the data in Article 2. For these reasons, all authors on both articles (including the Respondent) have agreed to the retraction of Articles 1 and 2 above.

Recent studies suggest that the temporary storage of visual detail in working memory is mediated by sensory recruitment or sustained patterns of stimulus-specific activation within feature-selective regions of visual cortex. According to a strong version of this hypothesis, the relative “quality” of these patterns should determine the clarity of an individual's memory. Here, we provide a direct test of this claim. We used fMRI and a forward encoding model to characterize population-level orientation-selective responses in visual cortex while human participants held an oriented grating in memory. This analysis, which enables a precise quantitative description of multivoxel, population-level activity measured during working memory storage, revealed graded response profiles whose amplitudes were greatest for the remembered orientation and fell monotonically as the angular distance from this orientation increased. Moreover, interparticipant differences in the dispersion—but not the amplitude—of these response profiles were strongly correlated with performance on a concurrent memory recall task. These findings provide important new evidence linking the precision of sustained population-level responses in visual cortex and memory acuity.