Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 5;12(1):4714. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24973-1.
Although the contents of working memory can be decoded from visual cortex activity, these representations may play a limited role if they are not robust to distraction. We used model-based fMRI to estimate the impact of distracting visual tasks on working memory representations in several visual field maps in visual and frontoparietal association cortex. Here, we show distraction causes the fidelity of working memory representations to briefly dip when both the memorandum and distractor are jointly encoded by the population activities. Distraction induces small biases in memory errors which can be predicted by biases in neural decoding in early visual cortex, but not other regions. Although distraction briefly disrupts working memory representations, the widespread redundancy with which working memory information is encoded may protect against catastrophic loss. In early visual cortex, the neural representation of information in working memory and behavioral performance are intertwined, solidifying its importance in visual memory.
虽然工作记忆的内容可以从视觉皮层活动中解码出来，但如果这些表示形式容易受到干扰，那么它们可能只能发挥有限的作用。我们使用基于模型的 fMRI 来估计在几个视觉和顶枕联合皮层的视野图中，分心的视觉任务对工作记忆表示的影响。在这里，我们表明，当记忆和分心物都由群体活动共同编码时，分心会导致工作记忆表示的保真度短暂下降。分心会导致记忆错误的小偏差，这些偏差可以通过早期视觉皮层中神经解码的偏差来预测，但不能通过其他区域来预测。尽管分心会短暂地破坏工作记忆的表示，但工作记忆信息以广泛冗余的方式进行编码，可能会防止灾难性的损失。在早期视觉皮层中，工作记忆和行为表现中的信息的神经表示是交织在一起的，这巩固了它在视觉记忆中的重要性。
