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What does ipsilateral delay activity reflect? Inferences from slow potentials in a lateralized visual working memory

Anna M Arend¹, Hubert D Zimmer

¹Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. a.arend@mx.uni-saarland.de

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

|June 16, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study reveals that processing relevant items in visual working memory (WM) solely engages the contralateral hemisphere. However, the processing of irrelevant items depends on the overall WM load, influencing ipsilateral brain activity.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology

Background:

The contralateral delay activity (CDA) is a neural correlate of visual working memory (WM) load.
Previous studies observed ipsilateral activity, suggesting involvement beyond contralateral processing, but its cause remained unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To differentiate between bilateral processing of relevant items and lateralized processing of irrelevant items.
To investigate the influence of relevant and irrelevant item numbers on brain activity during visual WM tasks.

Main Methods:

Utilized a lateralized change detection task.
Orthogonally varied the number of relevant and irrelevant items presented in visual WM.
Measured event-related potentials, specifically contralateral and ipsilateral slow potentials.

Main Results:

Load-dependent activity related to relevant items was purely contralateral.
Ipsilateral slow potentials were affected by irrelevant items only at low visual WM loads.
This effect of irrelevant items on ipsilateral activity disappeared at high WM loads.

Conclusions:

Relevant item processing in visual WM is primarily contralateral.
The processing of irrelevant items is modulated by the overall WM load, suggesting a dynamic filtering mechanism.
Ipsilateral activity reflects filtering of irrelevant information, which is capacity-dependent.