Information recovery following a retrospective cue decreases with time

Abstract

Working memory (WM) performance can be enhanced by an informative cue presented during storage. This effect, termed a retrocue benefit, can be used to explore how observers prioritize information stored in WM to guide behavior. Recent studies have demonstrated that neural representations of task-relevant memoranda are strengthened following the appearance of a retrocue, suggesting that participants can consult alternative information stores to supplement active memory traces. Here, we sought to better understand the nature of these memory store(s) by asking whether they are subject to the same temporal degradation seen in active memory representations.We reconstructed and quantified representations of remembered positions from alphaband EEG activity recorded while participants performed a retrospectively cued spatial WM task, and varied the temporal interval separating the encoding display and retrocue.Although we observed a partial recovery of location information in all cue conditions, the magnitude of recovery was linearly and inversely related to the timing of the retrocue.This suggests that participants' ability to supplement active memory representations with information from additional memory stores is not static: the information maintained in these stores may be subject to temporal degredation, or the stores themselves may become more difficult to access with time.