Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, Cyprus University of Technology, 15 Vragadinou Street, 3041, Limassol, Cyprus.
Department of Special Education and Psychology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Oct;29(5):1594-1624. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02107-y. Epub 2022 May 23.
Sensory visual areas are involved in encoding information in visual short-term memory (VSTM). Yet it remains unclear whether sensory visual cortex is a necessary component of the brain network for maintenance of information in VSTM. Here, we aimed to systematically review studies that have investigated the role of the sensory visual cortex in VSTM using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and to quantitatively explore these effects using meta-analyses. Fourteen studies were identified and reviewed. Eight studies provided sufficient data for meta-analysis. Two meta-analyses, one regarding the VSTM encoding phase (17 effect sizes) and one regarding the VSTM maintenance phase (15 effect sizes), two meta-regressions (32 effect sizes in each), and one exploratory meta-analysis were conducted. Our results indicate that the sensory visual cortex is similarly involved in both the encoding and maintenance VSTM phase. We suggest that some cases where evidence did not show significant TMS effects was due to low memory or perceptual task demands. Overall, these findings support the idea that sensory visual areas are part of the brain network responsible for successfully maintaining information in VSTM.
感觉视觉区域参与视觉短期记忆（VSTM）中的信息编码。然而，感觉视觉皮层是否是 VSTM 中信息维持的大脑网络的必要组成部分仍不清楚。在这里，我们旨在通过经颅磁刺激（TMS）系统地回顾研究感觉视觉皮层在 VSTM 中的作用，并使用荟萃分析定量探索这些影响。确定并回顾了 14 项研究。八项研究提供了足够的数据进行荟萃分析。进行了两项荟萃分析，一项针对 VSTM 编码阶段（17 个效应量），一项针对 VSTM 维持阶段（15 个效应量），两项元回归（每个阶段 32 个效应量）和一项探索性荟萃分析。我们的结果表明，感觉视觉皮层在编码和维持 VSTM 阶段都有类似的参与。我们认为，有些情况下没有显示出 TMS 效应的证据是由于记忆或感知任务的要求较低。总的来说，这些发现支持了感觉视觉区域是负责成功维持 VSTM 中信息的大脑网络的一部分的观点。
