In daily life, we use visual working memory (WM) to guide our actions. While attending to currently-relevant information, we must simultaneously maintain future-relevant information, and discard information that is no longer relevant. However, the neural mechanisms by which unattended, but future-relevant, information is maintained in working memory, and future-irrelevant information is discarded, are not well understood. Here, we investigated representations of these different information types, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in combination with multivoxel pattern analysis and computational modeling based on inverted encoding model simulations. We found that currently-relevant WM information in the focus of attention was maintained through representations in visual, parietal and posterior frontal brain regions, whereas deliberate forgetting led to suppression of the discarded representations in early visual cortex. In contrast, future-relevant information was neither inhibited nor actively maintained in these areas. These findings suggest that different neural mechanisms underlie the WM representation of currently- and future-relevant information, as compared to information that is discarded from WM.
Pubmed ID: 32641712 RIS Download
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Open source software suite for processing and analyzing human brain MRI images. Used for reconstruction of brain cortical surface from structural MRI data, and overlay of functional MRI data onto reconstructed surface. Contains automatic structural imaging stream for processing cross sectional and longitudinal data. Provides anatomical analysis tools, including: representation of cortical surface between white and gray matter, representation of the pial surface, segmentation of white matter from rest of brain, skull stripping, B1 bias field correction, nonlinear registration of cortical surface of individual with stereotaxic atlas, labeling of regions of cortical surface, statistical analysis of group morphometry differences, and labeling of subcortical brain structures.Operating System: Linux, macOS.
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