Behaviorally Irrelevant Feature Matching Increases Neural and Behavioral Working Memory Readout

There is an ongoing debate about whether working memory (WM) maintenance relies on persistent activity and/or short-term synaptic plasticity. This is a challenging question, because neuroimaging techniques in cognitive neuroscience measure activity only. Recently, neural perturbation techniques have been developed to tackle this issue, such as visual impulse perturbation or “pinging,” which reveals (un)attended WM content during maintenance. There are contrasting explanations of how pinging reveals WM content, which is central to the debate. Pinging could reveal mnemonic representations by perturbing content-specific networks or by increasing the neural signal-to-noise ratio of active neural states. Here we tested the extent to which the neural impulse response is patterned by the WM network, by presenting two different impulse stimuli. If the impulse interacts with WM networks, the WM-specific impulse response should be enhanced by physical overlap between the initial memory item and the subsequent external perturbation stimulus. This prediction was tested in a working memory task by matching or mismatching task-irrelevant spatial frequencies between memory items and impulse stimuli, as well as probes. Matching probe spatial frequency with memory items resulted in faster behavioral response times and matching impulse spatial frequency with memory items increased the specificity of the neural impulse response as measured from EEG. Matching spatial frequencies did neither result in globally stronger neural responses nor in a larger decrease in trial-to-trial variability compared to mismatching spatial frequencies. The improved neural and behavioral readout of irrelevant feature matching provide evidence that impulse perturbation interacts directly with the memory representations.