Neural Evidence for a Distinction Between Short-Term Memory and the Focus of Attention
By Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock, Andrew T. Drysdale, Klaus Oberauer, Bradley R. Postle. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2011
444 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It is widely assumed that the short-term retention of information is accomplished via maintenance of an active neural trace. However, we demonstrate that memory can be preserved across a brief delay despite the apparent loss of sustained representations. Delay period activity may, in fact, reflect the focus of attention, rather than STM. We unconfounded attention and memory by causing external and internal shifts of attention away from items that were being actively retained. Multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI indicated that only items within the focus of attention elicited an active neural trace. Activity corresponding to representations of items outside the focus quickly dropped to baseline. Nevertheless, this information was remembered after a brief delay. Our data also show that refocusing attention toward a previously unattended memory item can reactivate its neural signature. The loss of sustained activity has long been thought to indicate a disruption of STM, but our results suggest that, even for small memory loads not exceeding the capacity limits of STM, the active maintenance of a stimulus representation may not be necessary for its short-term retention.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e970c722126d929c2239d5466c2f2df6637461b3
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Paige Pytel
- John-Dylan Haynes
- Pieter R. Roelfsema
- Bernhard Spitzer
- P. C. Klink
- Edward F. Ester
- Thomas B. Christophel
- James V. Haxby
Citations in the corpus
- The Distributed Nature of Working Memory. (2017, background): “This would explain why persistent stimulus-selective activity in sensory regions is weaker or absent for items that are stored outside the focus of attention, while it is reinstated as soon as they regain their relevance [30,76,188].”
- Changes in behavioral priority influence the accessibility but not the quality of working memory content (2022, background): “studied by measuring brain activity linked with WM storage while participants perform a retrospectively cued memory task (Griffin & Nobre, 2003; Lewis-Peacock et al., 2012; Ester et al., 2018; Panichello & Buschman, 2021).”