Most daily tasks require frequent information exchange between working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM). However, the factors that modulate the reactivation of LTMs in WM remain to be explored. Here, we tested the effects of anticipated perceptual interference on reactivation using contralateral delay activity (CDA) in the EEG. On each trial, participants saw a previously studied object that was tested after a brief retention interval. In half of the blocks, the retention contained perceptual distractors. Half of the participants had larger CDA on interference blocks (WM preparers) and others on no interference blocks (LTM preparers). WM preparers showed smaller interference costs in accuracy suggesting that preparing against interference via reactivating LTMs in WM is a more effective strategy than relying on passive LTMs. Moreover, in interference blocks, contralateral alpha suppression, an index of spatial attention, disappeared during retention in anticipation of interference, mostly in WM preparers. These results indicate that individuals stopped attending to reactivated memories when anticipating interference, presumably to prevent the involuntary encoding of perceptual distractors that appear at attended locations. Together, these results highlight individual differences in preparing for anticipated interference in recruiting WM to store LTMs, and their effects on proneness to interference.
Flexible language use requires coordinated functioning of two systems: conceptual representations and control. The interaction between two systems can be observed when people are asked to match a word to a picture. Participants are slower and less accurate for related word-picture pairs (word: banana, picture: apple) relative to unrelated pairs (word: banjo, picture: apple). The mechanism underlying interference however is still unclear. We analyzed word-picture verification (WPM) performance of patients with stroke-induced lesions to the left-temporal (N = 5) or left-frontal cortex (N = 5) and matched controls (N = 12) using the drift diffusion model (DDM). In DDM the process of making a decision is described as the stochastic accumulation of evidence towards a response. The parameters of the DDM model that characterize this process are decision threshold, drift rate, starting point and non-decision time. Each of them bears cognitive interpretability and we compared the estimated model parameters from controls and patients to investigate the mechanisms of WPM interference. WPM performance in controls was explained by the amount of information needed to make a decision (decision threshold): a higher threshold was associated with related word-picture pairs relative to unrelated ones. No difference was found in the quality of the evidence (drift rate). This suggests an executive rather than semantic mechanism underlying WPM interference. Both patients with temporal and frontal lesions exhibited both increased drift rate and decision threshold for unrelated pairs relative to related ones. Left-frontal and temporal damage affected the computations required by WPM similarly, resulting in systematic deficits across lexical-semantic memory and executive functions. These results support a diverse but interactive role of lexical-semantic memory and semantic control mechanisms.
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