Heading direction tracks internally directed selective attention in visual working memory

Abstract

We shift our gaze even when we orient attention internally to visual representations in working memory. Here, we show the bodily orienting response associated with internal selective attention is widespread as it also includes the head. In three virtual reality (VR) experiments, participants remembered two visual items. After a working memory delay, a central colour cue indicated which item needed to be reproduced from memory. After the cue, head movements became biased in the direction of the memorised location of the cued memory item, despite there being no items to orient towards in the external environment. The head-direction bias had a distinct temporal profile from the gaze bias. Our findings reveal that directing attention within the spatial layout of visual working memory bears a strong relation to the overt head orienting response we engage when directing attention to sensory information in the external environment. The head-direction bias further demonstrates common neural circuitry is engaged during external and internal orienting of attention.

Temporally dissociable mechanisms of spatial, feature, and motor selection during working memory-guided behavior

“…Location-specific representations can be reconstructed from scalp EEG activity during WM tasks where location is irrelevant (34) and decoded from population spiking activity in prefrontal, parietal, and visual cortex following a cue that renders location irrelevant (e.g., 10). As noted above, human gaze (e.g., 28) and head position (31) are biased towards the location of a behaviorally prioritized item stored in WM, again in tasks where location is irrelevant. Conversely, changes in gaze position or shifts of covert spatial attention during WM can disrupt or introduce systematic biases in memory for visual features (e.g., color; 35–36), and memory guided comparisons for successively presented visual stimuli are impaired when they are rendered in different spatial positions (37–39).…”

“…What is meant by “selection”, however, is ill-defined. As summarized elsewhere (3, 52–53), several conceptually (and physiologically) distinct signals have been used to track the selection of WM content following changes in behavioral priority, including gaze position (e.g., 28), head position (e.g., 31), scalp EEG (17, 44), fMRI (43), and multi-unit activity (10). Thus, the mechanisms responsible for guiding the selection of WM content are poorly understood, and future research must focus on identifying mechanisms indexed by different physiological measurements and integrating these findings into a coherent model.…”

“…A handful of recent studies have reported small but robust biases in gaze (28)(29)(30) and head direction (31) towards the physical location of a retrospectively cued stimulus held in WM, even in tasks where storage of spatial information is unnecessary. It has been suggested that these biases occur independently of physiological signals associated with covert spatial attention, but the evidence is mixed.…”

Visual short-term memory related EEG components in a virtual reality setup

“…VR is increasingly being used to study visual short-term memory (e.g., Draschkow et al, 2020Draschkow et al, , 2022Thom et al, 2022) by offering a practical and well-controlled way to conduct experiments which incorporate (some of) the complexities of everyday life and to use its sophisticated tracking and stimulation opportunities. Up to now, most of these studies focus on behavioral and eye tracking measures.…”