Unimodal and Bimodal Access to Sensory Working Memories by Auditory and Visual Impulses

Michael J Wolff*, Güven Kandemir, Mark G Stokes, Elkan G Akyürek

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

33 Citations (Scopus)
108 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

It is unclear to what extent sensory processing areas are involved in the maintenance of sensory information in working memory (WM). Previous studies have thus far relied on finding neural activity in the corresponding sensory cortices, neglecting potential activity-silent mechanisms, such as connectivity-dependent encoding. It has recently been found that visual stimulation during visual WM maintenance reveals WM-dependent changes through a bottom-up neural response. Here, we test whether this impulse response is uniquely visual and sensory-specific. Human participants (both sexes) completed visual and auditory WM tasks while electroencephalography was recorded. During the maintenance period, the WM network was perturbed serially with fixed and task-neutral auditory and visual stimuli. We show that a neutral auditory impulse-stimulus presented during the maintenance of a pure tone resulted in a WM-dependent neural response, providing evidence for the auditory counterpart to the visual WM findings reported previously. Interestingly, visual stimulation also resulted in an auditory WM-dependent impulse response, implicating the visual cortex in the maintenance of auditory information, either directly or indirectly, as a pathway to the neural auditory WM representations elsewhere. In contrast, during visual WM maintenance, only the impulse response to visual stimulation was content-specific, suggesting that visual information is maintained in a sensory-specific neural network, separated from auditory processing areas.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)671-681
Number of pages11
JournalThe Journal of Neuroscience
Volume40
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15-Jan-2020

Keywords

  • EEG
  • multivariate pattern analysis
  • sensory working memory
  • INFORMATION
  • ACCOUNT
  • ORIENTATION
  • ATTENTION
  • CORTICES
  • REVEALS
  • SYSTEM
  • SAMPLE
  • CORTEX
  • SOUND

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