Superior Intraparietal Sulcus Controls the Variability of Visual Working Memory Precision

Weber, E.M. Galeano; Peters, Benjamin; Hahn, Tim; Bledowski, Christoph; Fiebach, Christian J.

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.1596-15.2016

Cited by 40 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…Future work could investigate how the brain representations of visual memories change with age, and whether the effects of context and metacognitive strategies are to support brain representations that are more like those of younger adults, or whether they recruit distinct brain systems or representational mechanisms. A number of neural markers of individual differences in VSTM are available, using EEG (e.g., Sauseng et al, 2009 ; Vogel & Machizawa, 2004 ), MEG (e.g., Honkanen, Rouhinen, Wang, Palva, & Palva, 2015 ; Mitchell & Cusack, 2011 ; Palva, Monto, Kulashekhar, & Palva, 2010 ; Siebenhühner et al, 2016 ), and fMRI (e.g., Ester, Anderson, Serences, & Awh, 2013 ; Galeano Weber, Peters, Hahn, Bledowski, & Fiebach, 2016 ; Linke et al, 2011 ; McNab & Klingberg, 2008 ; Stevens, Tappon, Garg, & Fair, 2012 ; Todd & Marois, 2005 ; Veldsman et al, 2017 ; Vicente-Grabovetsky, Carlin, & Cusack, 2014 ), with some differences reported across age groups (for a review see Sander et al, 2012 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: Preserved benefits of context and metacognition.

Mitchell

Cusack

2018

Psychology and Aging

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Visual short-term memory (VSTM) ability falls throughout the life span in healthy adults. Using a continuous report task, in a large, population-based sample, we first confirmed that this decline affects the quality and quantity of reported memories as well as knowledge of which item went where. Visual and sensorimotor precision also worsened with advancing age, but this did not account for the reduced memory performance. We then considered two strategies that older individuals might be able to adopt, to offset these memory declines: the use of contextual encoding, and metacognitive monitoring of performance. Context and metacognitive awareness were both associated with significantly better performance, however these effects did not interact with age in our sample. This suggests that older adults retain their capacity to boost memory performance through attention to external context and monitoring of their performance. Strategies that focus on taking advantage of these preserved abilities may therefore help to maintain VSTM performance with advancing age. The article reports on analysis of the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) data.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: Preserved benefits of context and metacognition.

Mitchell

Cusack

2018

Psychology and Aging

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“…Visual working memory (VWM) research has seen a convergence in recent years between cognitive models emphasizing the role of attention to knowledge structures (Cowan, 1988(Cowan, , 1995(Cowan, , 1999 and neurophysiological evidence for the sustained engagement of circuits in posterior cortex involved in the perception of the remembered information (Supèr et al, 2001;Pasternak and Greenlee, 2005;Serences et al, 2009;Sprague et al, 2014;Foster et al, 2016;van Kerkoerle et al, 2017). Among the outstanding questions about the precise mechanisms and boundary conditions of this principle of "sensorimotor recruitment" in working memory (e.g., D'Esposito and Postle, 2015) is understanding the contributions to VWM of the territory of the intraparietal suclus (IPS) vis-a-vis classically defined visual circuits of occipital cortex.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parietal-Occipital Interactions Underlying Control- and Representation-Related Processes in Working Memory for Nonspatial Visual Features

Gosseries

Yu²,

LaRocque

et al. 2018

J. Neurosci.

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Although the manipulation of load is popular in visual working memory research, many studies confound general attentional demands with context binding by drawing memoranda from the same stimulus category. In this fMRI study of human observers (both sexes), we created high- versus low-binding conditions, while holding load constant, by comparing trials requiring memory for the direction of motion of one random dot kinematogram (RDK; 1M trials) versus for three RDKs (3M), or versus one RDK and two color patches (1M2C). Memory precision was highest for 1M trials and comparable for 3M and 1M2C trials. And although delay-period activity in occipital cortex did not differ between the three conditions, returning to baseline for all three, multivariate pattern analysis decoding of a remembered RDK from occipital cortex was also highest for 1M trials and comparable for 3M and 1M2C trials. Delay-period activity in intraparietal sulcus (IPS), although elevated for all three conditions, displayed more sensitivity to demands on context binding than to load per se. The 1M-to-3M increase in IPS signal predicted the 1M-to-3M declines in both behavioral and neural estimates of working memory precision. These effects strengthened along a caudal-to-rostral gradient, from IPS0 to IPS5. Context binding-independent load sensitivity was observed when analyses were lateralized and extended into PFC, with trend-level effects evident in left IPS and strong effects in left lateral PFC. These findings illustrate how visual working memory capacity limitations arise from multiple factors that each recruit dissociable brain systems. Visual working memory capacity predicts performance on a wide array of cognitive and real-world outcomes. At least two theoretically distinct factors are proposed to influence visual working memory capacity limitations: an amodal attentional resource that must be shared across remembered items; and the demands on context binding. We unconfounded these two factors by varying load with items drawn from the same stimulus category ("high demands on context binding") versus items drawn from different stimulus categories ("low demands on context binding"). The results provide evidence for the dissociability, and the neural bases, of these two theorized factors, and they specify that the functions of intraparietal sulcus may relate more strongly to the control of representations than to the general allocation of attention.

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“…What are the neural mechanisms underlying VWM deficits and distraction effects in SZ? A recent study has identified the superior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) as the cortical region controlling resource allocation variability 42 . SZ patients have also been found the atypical neural processing in this region 43 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unexpected higher resilience to distraction during visual working memory in schizophrenia

Zhao

Ran

Zhang

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Visual working memory (VWM) and distractibility are two core executive functions in human cognition. It has been suggested that schizophrenia (SZ) patients exhibit worse VWM performance and lower resilience to distraction compared with healthy control (HC) subjects. Previous studies, however, have largely investigated these two functions separately. It still remains unclear what are the mechanisms of the deficits, especially the interactions between the two cognitive domains. Here we modify the standard delay-estimation task in VWM and explicitly add distractors in the task so as to examine the two domains simultaneously. We find that SZ indeed exhibit worse performance compared with HC in almost all VWM load and distraction levels, a result consistent with most prior experimental findings. But adding distractors does not selectively impose larger impacts on SZ performance. Furthermore, unlike most previous studies that only focused on behavioral performance, we use the variable precision model to disentangle the distraction effect on different computational components of VWM (resources and resources allocation variability etc.). Surprisingly, adding distractors significantly elevates resources allocation variability—a parameter describing the heterogeneity of resource allocation across different targets—in HC but not in SZ. This counterintuitive result suggests that the internal VWM process in SZ is less interfered by the distractors. However, this unexpected higher resilience to distraction might be associated with less flexible cognitive control mechanisms. In sum, our work demonstrates that multiple cognitive functions might jointly contribute to dysfunctions in SZ and their interactions might manifest differently from merely summing their independent effects.

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Superior Intraparietal Sulcus Controls the Variability of Visual Working Memory Precision

Cited by 40 publications

References 92 publications

Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: Preserved benefits of context and metacognition.

Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: Preserved benefits of context and metacognition.

Parietal-Occipital Interactions Underlying Control- and Representation-Related Processes in Working Memory for Nonspatial Visual Features

Unexpected higher resilience to distraction during visual working memory in schizophrenia

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