Auditory objects in working memory include task-irrelevant features.

Object-based attention operates both in perception and visual working memory. While the efficient perception of auditory stimuli also requires the formation of auditory objects, little is known about their role in auditory working memory (AWM). To investigate whether attention to one object feature in AWM leads to the involuntary maintenance of another, task-irrelevant feature, we conducted four experiments.

Decoding of Working Memory Contents in Auditory Cortex Is Not Distractor-Resistant.

Working memory enables the temporary storage of relevant information in the service of behavior. Neuroimaging studies have suggested that sensory cortex is involved in maintaining contents in working memory. This raised the question of how sensory regions maintain memory representations during the exposure to distracting stimuli.

Interference between items stored for distinct tasks in visual working memory.

The action perspective on working memory suggests that memory representations are coded according to their specific temporal and behavioral task demands. This stands in contrast to theories that assume representations are stored in a task-agnostic format within a "common workspace". Here, we tested whether visual items that are memorized for different tasks are stored separately from one another or show evidence of inter-item interference during concurrent maintenance, indicating a common storage.

Decoding Concurrent Representations of Pitch and Location in Auditory Working Memory.

Multivariate analyses of hemodynamic signals serve to identify the storage of specific stimulus contents in working memory (WM). Representations of visual stimuli have been demonstrated both in sensory regions and in higher cortical areas. While previous research has typically focused on the WM maintenance of a single content feature, it remains unclear whether two separate features of a single object can be decoded concurrently.

Decoding Spatial Versus Non-spatial Processing in Auditory Working Memory.

Objective: Research on visual working memory has shown that individual stimulus features are processed in both specialized sensory regions and higher cortical areas. Much less evidence exists for auditory working memory. Here, a main distinction has been proposed between the processing of spatial and non-spatial sound features.

Context information supports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes.

Serial dependence is thought to promote perceptual stability by compensating for small changes of an object's appearance across memory episodes. So far, it has been studied in situations that comprised only a single object. The question of how we selectively create temporal stability of several objects remains unsolved.

Cognitive Performance and Psychological Distress in Breast Cancer Patients at Disease Onset.

Objective: Many cancer patients complain about cognitive dysfunction. While cognitive deficits have been attributed to the side effects of chemotherapy, there is evidence for impairment at disease onset, prior to cancer-directed therapy. Further debated issues concern the relationship between self-reported complaints and objective test performance and the role of psychological distress.

Differential trajectories of memory quality and guessing across sequential reports from working memory.

Working memory enables the storage of few items for a short period of time. Previous research has shown that items in working memory cannot be accessed equally well, indicating that they are held in at least two different states with different capacity limitations. However, it is unclear whether differences between states are due to limitations of the number of items that can be stored, or the quality with which items are stored.

Two types of serial dependence in visual working memory.

Stimulus representations in working memory depend on memory traces of past stimuli both from previous trials and from the current trial. However, it is unclear whether the same or different mechanisms underlie this serial dependence across and within trials. We directly contrasted estimates of bias for pairs of immediately successive stimuli across and within trials.

Sequential whole report accesses different states in visual working memory.

Working memory (WM) enables a rapid access to a limited number of items that are no longer physically present. WM studies usually involve the encoding and retention of multiple items, while probing a single item only. Hence, little is known about how well multiple items can be reported from WM.

Pre-encoding gamma-band activity during auditory working memory.

Previous magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have revealed gamma-band activity at sensors over parietal and fronto-temporal cortex during the delay phase of auditory spatial and non-spatial match-to-sample tasks, respectively. While this activity was interpreted as reflecting the memory maintenance of sound features, we noted that task-related activation differences might have been present already prior to the onset of the sample stimulus. The present study focused on the interval between a visual cue indicating which sound feature was to be memorized (lateralization or pitch) and sample sound presentation to test for task-related activation differences preceding stimulus encoding.

Superior Intraparietal Sulcus Controls the Variability of Visual Working Memory Precision.

Unlabelled: Limitations of working memory (WM) capacity depend strongly on the cognitive resources that are available for maintaining WM contents in an activated state. Increasing the number of items to be maintained in WM was shown to reduce the precision of WM and to increase the variability of WM precision over time. Although WM precision was recently associated with neural codes particularly in early sensory cortex, we have so far no understanding of the neural bases underlying the variability of WM precision, and how WM precision is preserved under high load.

Recurrence of task set-related MEG signal patterns during auditory working memory.

Processing of auditory spatial and non-spatial information in working memory has been shown to rely on separate cortical systems. While previous studies have demonstrated differences in spatial versus non-spatial processing from the encoding of to-be-remembered stimuli onwards, here we investigated whether such differences would be detectable already prior to presentation of the sample stimulus. We analyzed broad-band magnetoencephalography data from 15 healthy adults during an auditory working memory paradigm starting with a visual cue indicating the task-relevant stimulus feature for a given trial (lateralization or pitch) and a subsequent 1.

Activity in human visual and parietal cortex reveals object-based attention in working memory.

Visual attention enables observers to select behaviorally relevant information based on spatial locations, features, or objects. Attentional selection is not limited to physically present visual information, but can also operate on internal representations maintained in working memory (WM) in service of higher-order cognition. However, only little is known about whether attention to WM contents follows the same principles as attention to sensory stimuli.

Neural correlates of chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment.

Cancer survivors frequently experience cognitive deficits following chemotherapy. The most commonly affected functions include memory, attention and executive control. The present paper reviews animal research and clinical studies including event-related potential (ERP) and neuroimaging investigations of chemotherapy-related changes of brain structure and function.

fMRI characterization of visual working memory recognition.

Encoding and maintenance of information in visual working memory have been extensively studied, highlighting the crucial and capacity-limiting role of fronto-parietal regions. In contrast, the neural basis of recognition in visual working memory has remained largely unspecified. Cognitive models suggest that recognition relies on a matching process that compares sensory information with the mental representations held in memory.

Separable neural bases for subprocesses of recognition in working memory.

Working memory supports the recognition of objects in the environment. Memory models have postulated that recognition relies on 2 processes: assessing the degree of similarity between an external stimulus and memory representations and testing the resulting summed-similarity value against a critical level for recognition. Here, we varied the similarity between samples held in working memory and a probe to investigate these 2 processes with magnetoencephalography.

Basic operations in working memory: contributions from functional imaging studies.

Working memory (WM) constitutes a fundamental aspect of human cognition. It refers to the ability to keep information active for further use, while allowing it to be prioritized, modified and protected from interference. Much research has addressed the storage function of WM, however, its 'working' aspect still remains underspecified.

What "works" in working memory? Separate systems for selection and updating of critical information.

Cognition depends critically on working memory, the active representation of a limited number of items over short periods of time. In addition to the maintenance of information during the course of cognitive processing, many tasks require that some of the items in working memory become transiently more important than others. Based on cognitive models of working memory, we hypothesized two complementary essential cognitive operations to achieve this: a selection operation that retrieves the most relevant item, and an updating operation that changes the focus of attention onto it.

The timing of feedback to early visual cortex in the perception of long-range apparent motion.

When 2 visual stimuli are presented one after another in different locations, they are often perceived as one, but moving object. Feedback from area human motion complex hMT/V5+ to V1 has been hypothesized to play an important role in this illusory perception of motion. We measured event-related responses to illusory motion stimuli of varying apparent motion (AM) content and retinal location using Electroencephalography.

At your own peril: an ERP study of voluntary task set selection processes in the medial frontal cortex.

A tool that is commonly used to investigate selection among different alternatives in a changing environment is the task-switching paradigm. Functional neuroimaging has pointed out a role for the posterior medial frontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex in the voluntary selection of task sets. In the present study, we set out to investigate the temporal dynamics of these agency-related processes (in task choice vs.

Visual target modulation of functional connectivity networks revealed by self-organizing group ICA.

We applied a data-driven analysis based on self-organizing group independent component analysis (sogICA) to fMRI data from a three-stimulus visual oddball task. SogICA is particularly suited to the investigation of the underlying functional connectivity and does not rely on a predefined model of the experiment, which overcomes some of the limitations of hypothesis-driven analysis. Unlike most previous applications of ICA in functional imaging, our approach allows the analysis of the data at the group level, which is of particular interest in high order cognitive studies.