Parietal and early visual cortices encode working memory content across mental 
transformations

Christophel, Thomas B.; Cichy, Radoslaw M.; Hebart, Martin N.; Haynes, John-Dylan

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.11.018

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Parietal and early visual cortices encode working memory content across mental transformations

MPS-Authors

There are no MPG-Authors in the publication available

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Christophel, T. B., Cichy, R. M., Hebart, M. N., & Haynes, J.-D. (2015). Parietal and early visual cortices encode working memory content across mental transformations. NeuroImage, 106, 198-206. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.11.018.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0005-2155-6

Abstract

Active and flexible manipulations of memory contents “in the mind's eye” are believed to occur in a dedicated neural workspace, frequently referred to as visual working memory. Such a neural workspace should have two important properties: The ability to store sensory information across delay periods and the ability to flexibly transform sensory information. Here we used a combination of functional MRI and multivariate decoding to indentify such neural representations. Subjects were required to memorize a complex artificial pattern for an extended delay, then rotate the mental image as instructed by a cue and memorize this transformed pattern. We found that patterns of brain activity already in early visual areas and posterior parietal cortex encode not only the initially remembered image, but also the transformed contents after mental rotation. Our results thus suggest that the flexible and general neural workspace supporting visual working memory can be realized within posterior brain regions.