Human gaze tracks attentional focusing in memorized visual space.

Brain areas that control gaze are also recruited for covert shifts of spatial attention. In the external space of perception, there is a natural ecological link between the control of gaze and spatial attention, as information sampled at covertly attended locations can inform where to look next. Attention can also be directed internally to representations held within the spatial layout of visual working memory.

Concurrent visual and motor selection during visual working memory guided action.

Visual working memory enables us to hold onto past sensations in anticipation that these may become relevant for guiding future actions. Yet laboratory tasks have treated visual working memories in isolation from their prospective actions and have focused on the mechanisms of memory retention rather than utilization. To understand how visual memories become used for action, we linked individual memory items to particular actions and independently tracked the neural dynamics of visual and motor selection when memories became used for action.

Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1·2 million individuals in the USA between 2011 and 2015: a cross-sectional study.

Background: Exercise is known to be associated with reduced risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes, but its association with mental health remains unclear. We aimed to examine the association between exercise and mental health burden in a large sample, and to better understand the influence of exercise type, frequency, duration, and intensity.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we analysed data from 1 237 194 people aged 18 years or older in the USA from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System survey.

Decoding the influence of anticipatory states on visual perception in the presence of temporal distractors.

Anticipatory states help prioritise relevant perceptual targets over competing distractor stimuli and amplify early brain responses to these targets. Here we combine electroencephalography recordings in humans with multivariate stimulus decoding to address whether anticipation also increases the amount of target identity information contained in these responses, and to ask how targets are prioritised over distractors when these compete in time. We show that anticipatory cues not only boost visual target representations, but also delay the interference on these target representations caused by temporally adjacent distractor stimuli-possibly marking a protective window reserved for high-fidelity target processing.

Benefits of flexible prioritization in working memory can arise without costs.

Most recent models conceptualize working memory (WM) as a continuous resource, divided up according to task demands. When an increasing number of items need to be remembered, each item receives a smaller chunk of the memory resource. These models predict that the allocation of attention to high-priority WM items during the retention interval should be a zero-sum game: improvements in remembering cued items come at the expense of uncued items because resources are dynamically transferred from uncued to cued representations.