Visual working memory

…How visual working memory (VWM) remains stable across gaze shifts and, specifically, the type of reference frame in which VWM content is stored, are poorly understood. VWM is typically maintained in the brain hemisphere contralateral to the memorandum [1,2,3,4], indicating a retinotopic (“gaze-centered”) reference frame. Yet, recent work [5] shows that VWM is transferred across hemispheres following a gaze shift, sugg

Visual working memory (VWM) sustains information online for future usage as single features as well as coherent object representations. The proper functioning of VWM is dependent not only on the integration of individual visual features in our environment, but also on the inhibition of distractors or irrelevant features. It has, however, remained untested whether long-range synchronization of neuronal oscillations would mediate the integration of relevant features into coherent objects or reflect the inhibition of irrelevant features.We recorded concurrent magneto- and electroencephalography (

Visual Working Memory (VWM) is responsible for retaining and manipulating visual information. Accordingly, most of past-research has focused on investigating these properties. This study examined VWM’s ability to encode the future, specifically, representing objects and events before they appear. Methods: In Experiment 1 participants performed a change-detection task with moving objects. In the critical condition, objects moved towards each other, then met to form a new conjunction representation, while in other conditions objects moved independently. We monitored the Contralateral Delay Activ

Working memory is about the past but for the future. Adopting such a future-focused perspective shifts the narrative of working memory as a limited-capacity storage system to working memory as an anticipatory buffer that helps us prepare for potential and sequential upcoming behaviour. In my talk, I will present a series of our recent studies that have started to reveal emerging principles of a working memory that looks forward – highlighting, amongst others, how selective attention plays a vital role in prioritising internal contents for behaviour, and the bi-directional links between visual

Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in capacity, but memorizing meaningful objects may refine this limitation. However, meaningless and meaningful stimuli usually differ perceptually and an object’s association with meaning is typically already established before the actual experiment. We applied a strict control over these potential confounds by asking observers (N=45) to actively learn associations of (initially) meaningless objects. To this end, a change detection task presented Chinese characters, which were meaningless to our observers. Subsequently, half of the characters were consist

Working memory is a critical component of cognition as it allows for the flexible coupling of sensory input to motor output. However, imprecise maintenance of sensory information in working memory and the influence of intervening sensory inputs may lead to history-dependent biases in behaviour, such as recency or contraction bias. Recent studies have proposed that approximate (Lange et al., 2021) or imbalanced (Deneve & Jardri, 2016) hierarchical Bayesian inference may account for such biases, and have suggested a mapping of latent sensory representations onto the hierarchical organization

Visual working memory (WM) is the cognitive function that temporarily keeps sensory information online. There is a debate on WM's limited ability: holding a fixed small amount of items or a limited resource allocated to all items stored. The current study tries to solve the debate by model comparison, involving the Mixture Model, Variable Precision Model, and All-guessing models. Furthermore, though multiple subregions of the human brain cortex coordinate to support the WM functions, their distinct contributions are under debate. By comparing WM performance with transcranial magnetic stimulati

Neural correlates of visual working memory have been found in early visual, parietal, and prefrontal regions. These findings have spurred fruitful debate over how and where in the brain memories might be represented. Here, I will present data from multiple experiments to demonstrate how a focus on behavioral requirements can unveil a more comprehensive understanding of the visual working memory system. Specifically, items in working memory must be maintained in a highly robust manner, resilient to interference. At the same time, storage mechanisms must preserve a high degree of flexibility in

…Our working memory instead maintains a mixture of the observed feature values and categorical/gist information. I will discuss evidence from computational models supporting a mix of categorical and fine-detail information in working memory. Having established the need for two memory formats in working memory, I will discuss whether categorical and fine-detailed information for a stimulus are represented separately or as a single unified representation. Computational models of these two potential

The limited capacity of visual working memory constrains the quantity and quality of the information we can store in mind for ongoing processing. Research from our lab has demonstrated that verbal labeling/categorization of visual inputs increases its retention and fidelity in visual working memory. In this talk, I will outline the hypotheses that explain the interaction between visual and verbal inputs in working memory, leading to the boosts we observed. I will further show how manipulations of the categorical distinctiveness of the labels, the timing of their occurrence, to which item label

Neural correlates of visual working memory have been found in early visual, parietal, and prefrontal regions. These findings have spurred fruitful debate over how and where in the brain memories might be represented. Here, I will present data from multiple experiments to demonstrate how a focus on behavioral requirements can unveil a more comprehensive understanding of the visual working memory system. Specifically, items in working memory must be maintained in a highly robust manner, resilient to interference. At the same time, storage mechanisms must preserve a high degree of flexibility in

Visual working memory (VWM) allows us to maintain a small amount of task-relevant information in mind so that we can use them to guide our behavior. Although past studies have successfully characterized its capacity limit and representational quality during maintenance, the consequence of its usage for task-relevant behaviors has been largely unknown. In this talk, I will demonstrate that VWM representations get distorted when they are used for perceptual comparisons with new visual inputs, especially when the inputs are subjectively similar to the VWM representations. Furthermore, I will show

Our research investigates how processes of attention, visual working memory (VWM), and decision-making combine to translate perception into action. Within this framework, the role of VWM is to form stable representations of transient stimulus events that allow them to be identified by a decision process, which we model as a diffusion process. In psychophysical tasks, we find the capacity of VWM is well defined by a sample-size model, which attributes changes in VWM precision with set-size to differences in the number evidence samples recruited to represent stimuli. In the first part of the tal

In many ways, cognitive neuroscience is the attempt to use physiological observation to clarify the mechanisms that shape behavior. Over the past 25 years, fMRI has provided a system-wide and yet somewhat spatially precise view of the response in human cortex evoked by a wide variety of stimuli and task contexts. The current talk focuses on the other direction of inference; the implications of this observed functional organization for behavior. To begin, we must interrogate the methodological and empirical frameworks underlying our derivation of this organization, partially by exploring its re