Intermodal Attention Shifts in Multimodal Working Memory

Abstract

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We investigated whether the attention-based maintenance of stimulus representations that were encoded through different modalities is flexibly controlled by top-down mechanisms that depend on behavioral goals. Distinct components of the ERP reflect the maintenance of tactile and visual information in WM. We concurrently measured tactile (tCDA) and visual contralateral delay activity (CDA) to track the attentional activation of tactile and visual information during multimodal WM. Participants simultaneously received tactile and visual sample stimuli on the left and right sides and memorized all stimuli on one task-relevant side. After 500 msec, an auditory retrocue indicated whether the sample set's tactile or visual content had to be compared with a subsequent test stimulus set. tCDA and CDA components that emerged simultaneously during the encoding phase were consistently reduced after retrocues that marked the corresponding (tactile or visual) modality as task-irrelevant. The absolute size of cue-dependent modulations was similar for the tCDA/CDA components and did not depend on the number of tactile/visual stimuli that were initially encoded into WM. Our results suggest that modality-specific maintenance processes in sensory brain regions are flexibly modulated by topdown influences that optimize multimodal WM representations for behavioral goals. ■

Selective attention on representations in working memory: cognitive and neural mechanisms

“…Third, the reliability of the cues could vary from 50% to 100%, while reliability increased the retro-cue effects ( Shimi et al, 2013 ; Gunseli et al, 2015 ). Fourth, there were cues in different sensory domain, including visual ( Landman, Spekreijse & Lamme, 2003 ; Griffin & Nobre, 2003 ), auditory ( Backer & Alain, 2012 ) and tactile ( Katus & Eimer, 2015 ), even crossmodal cues ( Katus, Grubert & Eimer, 2016 ). Fifth, the retro-cue could be presented either centrally or peripherally, when the effects were comparable ( Matsukura et al, 2014 ).…”

The Sources of Dual-task Costs in Multisensory Working Memory Tasks

“…CSDs were separately averaged across three adjacent electrodes contralateral and ipsilateral to the task-relevant side. Tactile contralateral delay activity (tCDA component) was measured at lateral central scalp regions (C3/4, FC3/4, CP3/4), and visual contralateral delay activity (CDA) was measured at lateral occipital regions (PO7/8, PO3/4, O1/2) (same electrodes as in prior work: Katus et al, 2017;Katus & Eimer, 2016;Katus & Eimer, 2018). Statistical tests were conducted on difference values of contra-minus ipsilateral ERPs, averaged between 300 and 1000 ms after sample onset (e.g, Vogel & Machizawa, 2004).…”

Shifts of Spatial Attention in Visual and Tactile Working Memory are Controlled by Independent Modality-Specific Mechanisms

“…Tactile contralateral delay activity (tCDA component) was measured at lateral central scalp regions (C3/4, FC3/4, CP3/4), and visual contralateral delay activity (CDA) was measured at lateral occipital regions (PO7/8, PO3/4, O1/2). The electrode locations used to quantify tCDA and CDA components were identical to those employed in previous studies (Katus and Eimer 2016;Katus, Grubert, and Eimer 2017;Katus and Eimer 2018a;2018b). Separate CDA/tCDA components were computed for the delay periods following the two sample sets (S1 and S2), based on averaged CSDs obtained between 300 and 1000 ms following the onset of S1 or S2 (e.g., Katus Spline-interpolated topographical voltage maps were computed as follows:…”