Does visual working memory represent the predicted locations of future target objects? An event-related brain potential study

Abstract

(2015) 'Does visual working memory represent the predicted locations of future target ob jects? An event-related brain potential study. ', Brain research., 1626 . pp. 258-266. Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres. 2014.10.011 Publisher's copyright statement: NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Brain Research. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be re ected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A de nitive version was subsequently published in Brain Research, 1626, 11 November 2015, 258-266, 10.1016/j.brainres.2014.011. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractDuring the maintenance of task-relevant objects in visual working memory, the contralateral delay activity (CDA) is elicited over the hemisphere opposite to the visual field where these objects are presented. The presence of this lateralised CDA component demonstrates the existence of position-dependent object representations in working memory. We employed a change detection task to investigate whether the represented object locations in visual working memory are shifted in preparation for the known location of upcoming comparison stimuli. On each trial, bilateral memory displays were followed after a delay period by bilateral test displays. Participants had to encode and maintain three visual objects on one side of the memory display, and to judge whether they were identical or different to three objects in the test display. Task-relevant memory and test stimuli were located in the same visual hemifield in the no-shift task, and on opposite sides in the horizontal shift task. CDA components of similar size were triggered contralateral to the memorized objects in both tasks. The absence of a polarity reversal of the CDA in the horizontal shift task demonstrated that there was no preparatory shift of memorized object location towards the side of the upcoming comparison stimuli. These results suggest that visual working memory represents the locations of visual objects during encoding, and that the matching of memorized and test objects at different locations is based on a comparison process that can bridge spatial translations between these objects.

Bridging prediction and attention in current research on perception and action

“…Although animal research revealed that receptive fields of neurons are remapped prior to and during saccadic eye movements to match the new locations of visual stimuli during the next fixation (Nakamura and Colby, 2002), this seem not to apply for humans. Grubert and Eimer (2015) tested whether human visual working memory represents the predicted locations of future target objects. If it would, the contralateral delay activity (CDA) of the ERP should be elicited in the critical experimental conditions.…”

Working memory representations are spatially transferred in cortex during mental manipulations

“…While CDA has been shown to track the number of relevant items, and not distractors 14,22 , it has not been demonstrated to track transformed WM contents before. In fact, an earlier study indicated that CDA does not change sign when objects are encoded in one hemifield and later tested in the opposite 23 . We suspect the effect observed here requires a task with strong emphasis on updating contents in real time to prevent updating of WM contents during the test period itself.…”

The effect of perceptual interference on prioritization of feature dimensions in visual working memory

“…R. A. Conway et al, 2003;Daneman & Carpenter, 1980;Fukuda et al, 2010;Oberauer, 2019). In a typical VWM task, participants are asked to remember a set of stimuli and retain the stimulus content for recognition (Feldmann-Wüstefeld, 2021;Grubert & Eimer, 2015;Hitch et al, 2020;Liang et al, 2019;Luck & Vogel, 1997) or recall (Arnicane & Souza, 2021;Gunseli et al, 2015;Niklaus et al, 2017;Schneider et al, 2017;Ye et al, 2019;Zhang & Luck, 2008) during the testing phase, after the stimuli have disappeared. This process corresponds to the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval stages of VWM (Baddeley, 2012;Kim, 2019;Maniglia & Souza, 2020;Myers et al, 2015;Vogel & Machizawa, 2004;Yu & Shim, 2017).…”