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Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
Visual Working Memory Is Independent of the Cortical Spacing Between Memoranda
The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol.38(12), pp.3116-3123
2018
PMCID: PMC5864153
PMID: 29459370
Abstract
The sensory recruitment hypothesis states that visual short-term memory is maintained in the same visual cortical areas that initially encode a stimulus' features. Although it is well established that the distance between features in visual cortex determines their visibility, a limitation known as crowding, it is unknown whether short-term memory is similarly constrained by the cortical spacing of memory items. Here, we investigated whether the cortical spacing between sequentially presented memoranda affects the fidelity of memory in humans (of both sexes). In a first experiment, we varied cortical spacing by taking advantage of the log-scaling of visual cortex with eccentricity, presenting memoranda in peripheral vision sequentially along either the radial or tangential visual axis with respect to the fovea. In a second experiment, we presented memoranda sequentially either within or beyond the critical spacing of visual crowding, a distance within which visual features cannot be perceptually distinguished due to their nearby cortical representations. In both experiments and across multiple measures, we found strong evidence that the ability to maintain visual features in memory is unaffected by cortical spacing. These results indicate that the neural architecture underpinning working memory has properties inconsistent with the known behavior of sensory neurons in visual cortex. Instead, the dissociation between perceptual and memory representations supports a role of higher cortical areas such as posterior parietal or prefrontal regions or may involve an as yet unspecified mechanism in visual cortex in which stimulus features are bound to their temporal order.
Details
- Title
- Visual Working Memory Is Independent of the Cortical Spacing Between Memoranda
- Authors
- William J Harrison (Corresponding Author) - University of CambridgePaul M Bays (Author) - University of Cambridge
- Publication details
- The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol.38(12), pp.3116-3123
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Date published
- 2018
- DOI
- 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2645-17.2017
- ISSN
- 1529-2401; 0270-6474
- PMID
- 29459370; PMC5864153
- Copyright note
- © 2018 Harrison and Bays. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
- Grant note
- This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Health - Psychology
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99995994802621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web Of Science research areas
- Neurosciences