The contralateral delay activity as a neural measure of visual working memory

Luria, Roy; Balaban, Halely; Awh, Edward; Vogel, Edward K.

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.01.003

Cited by 277 publications

(309 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…The CDA is considered to be a marker of visual working memory storage (Vogel & Machizawa, 2004; McCollough, Machizawa, & Vogel, 2007; Luria, Balaban, Awh, & Vogel, 2016; but see Eimer & Kiss, 2010; Katus & Eimer, 2015; Berggren & Eimer, 2016), and so the present results fit with the possibility that participants store alphanumeric and verbal stimuli in visual working memory during change detection tasks such as the one used here. These results also fit well with fMRI studies that show recruitment of posterior parietal cortex (PPC) for both simple visual stimuli and for verbal stimuli (Todd & Marois, 2004; Majerus et al, 2011; 2014), suggesting that PPC could participate in maintaining diverse codes (Xu, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Contralateral delay activity tracks the storage of visually presented letters and words

2018

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Electrophysiological studies have demonstrated that the maintenance of items in visual working memory (VWM) is indexed by the contralateral delay activity (CDA), which increases in amplitude as the number of objects to remember increases, plateauing at VWM capacity. Previous work has primarily utilized simple visual items, such as colored squares or picture stimuli. Despite the frequent use of verbal stimuli in seminal investigations of visual attention and memory, it is unknown whether temporary storage of letters and words also elicit a typical load-sensitive CDA. Given their close associations with language and phonological codes, it is possible that participants store these stimuli phonologically, and not visually. Participants completed a standard visual change-detection task while their event-related potentials were recorded. Experiment 1 compared the CDA elicited by colored squares compared to uppercase consonants and Experiment 2 compared the CDA elicited by words compared to colored bars. Behavioral accuracy of change detection decreased with increasing set size for colored squares, letter, and words. We found that a capacity-limited CDA was present for colored squares, letters, and word arrays, suggesting that the visual codes for letters and words were maintained in VWM, despite the potential for transfer to verbal working memory. These results suggest that, despite their verbal associations, letters and words elicit the electrophysiological marker of VWM encoding and storage.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Contralateral delay activity tracks the storage of visually presented letters and words

2018

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“…However, we observed no significant differences in CDA magnitude between these trial types. If the CDA reflects the number of items being actively maintained in VSTM (reviewed in Luria et al, 2016) and retro-cues reduce this number in the present experiment from two to one, one might predict a reduction in CDA magnitude following the retro-cue. Previous studies have often investigated the CDA for stimuli that may lack preexisting semantic representations, unlike the stimuli used in the current study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

The lasting memory enhancements of retrospective attention

et al. 2016

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Behavioral research has shown that spatial cues that orient attention toward task relevant items being maintained in visual short-term memory (VSTM) enhance item memory accuracy. However, it is unknown if these retrospective attentional cues (“retro-cues”) enhance memory beyond typical short-term memory delays. It is also unknown whether retro-cues affect the spatial information associated with VSTM representations. Emerging evidence suggests that processes that affect short-term memory maintenance may also affect long-term memory (LTM) but little work has investigated the role of attention in LTM. In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated the duration of retrospective attention effects and the impact of retrospective attention manipulations on VSTM representations. Results revealed that retro-cueing improved both VSTM and LTM memory accuracy and that posterior maximal ERPs observed during VSTM maintenance predicted subsequent LTM performance. N2pc ERPs associated with attentional selection were attenuated by retro-cueing suggesting that retrospective attention may disrupt maintenance of spatial configural information in VSTM. Collectively, these findings suggest that retrospective attention can alter the structure of memory representations, which impacts memory performance beyond short-term memory delays.

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“…The CDA amplitude likely reflects the number of items held in working memory (Luria et al, 2016;Vogel and Machizawa, 2004). In contrast to healthy controls, the CDA amplitude was attenuated in PD patients, possibly indicating that PD patients have difficulty retaining all relevant information in visual working memory.…”

Section: Memorymentioning

confidence: 95%