Abstract: One of the most important issues concerning the foundations of conscious perception centers on the question of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of ‘iconic memory’ to argue that perceptual consciousness is richer (i.e., has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. Recently, the overflow argument has been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This paper reviews the controversy, arguing that proponents of sparse perception are committed to the postulation of (i) a peculiar kind of generic conscious representation that has no independent rationale and (ii) an unmotivated form of unconscious representation that in some cases conflicts with what we know about unconscious representation. One of the most important issues concerning the foundations of conscious perception centers on the question of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of ‘iconic memory’ to argue that perceptual consciousness is richer (i.e., has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. Recently, the overflow argument has been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This paper reviews the controversy, arguing that proponents of sparse perception are committed to the postulation of (i) a peculiar kind of generic conscious representation that has no independent rationale and (ii) an unmotivated form of unconscious representation that in some cases conflicts with what we know about unconscious representation. a representation is access-conscious if it is made available to cognitive processing. a misnomer for the phenomenon where people fail to identify changes in stimuli that are easy to notice if one attends to and conceptualizes the items that change. a type of visual short-term memory, which consists in a persisting visual representation that is intermediate in capacity between retinally-based visual iconic memory and visual working memory and can last 4-5 seconds. first-person judgment made about one's experience. an argument to the effect that the capacity of phenomenal consciousness exceeds that of cognitive access. what it is like for a subject to have an experience. a type of visual short-term memory in which visual representations persist after the stimulus has disappeared. Retinal persistence fuels what might be termed ‘pure’ visual iconic memory, lasting a few hundred milliseconds, whereas the weaker fragile visual short-term memory is based on persisting cortical activation. a term that is ambiguous between visual iconic memory, fragile visual short-term memory and visual working memory a form of short-term memory which can persist much longer and has a smaller capacity than any form of iconic memory and probably requires categorization. This form of memory is often regarded as the leading edge of long-term memory and is largely shared with other perceptual modalities (see Box 1).