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Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
Published on: March 18, 2019
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Multiple foci of spatial attention in multimodal working memory
1Department of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom; Institut für Psychologie, Universität Leipzig, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Neuroimage
|August 22, 2016
Summary
This study shows that working memory (WM) uses distinct brain areas for touch and vision, with attention controlling which sensory information is maintained. These processes operate independently, allowing simultaneous processing of multimodal information.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Neuroscience of Perception
- Human Sensory Processing
Background:
- Working memory (WM) relies on attentional activation of stored sensory representations in perceptual brain regions.
- Understanding how the brain maintains multimodal sensory information in WM is crucial for cognitive science.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the maintenance of tactile and visual information in working memory.
- To concurrently track attention-based maintenance of information in somatosensory and visual brain areas using event-related potentials (ERPs).
Main Methods:
- Utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure tactile and visual contralateral delay activity (tCDA/CDA) in a bimodal working memory task.
- Participants performed a task involving memorizing tactile and visual stimuli presented on the same or opposite sides, followed by memory tests for either touch or vision.
- Analyzed the spatial and temporal characteristics of tCDA and CDA components during stimulus maintenance and retrieval.
Main Results:
- In same-side blocks, tCDA and CDA components emerged contralaterally over the same hemisphere, reflecting concurrent maintenance of tactile and visual information.
- In opposite-side blocks, tCDA and CDA emerged over different hemispheres but showed similar sizes and onset latencies, indicating independent spatial attention mechanisms.
- Demonstrated distinct foci of tactile and visual spatial attention maintained concurrently on task-relevant representations in working memory.
Conclusions:
- Working memory maintenance involves distinct, simultaneously operating, and largely independent modality-specific processes.
- Multimodal information is stored in distributed perceptual brain areas, with attention directing the activation and maintenance of specific sensory representations.
- Findings suggest that the brain can independently manage and process spatial attention for tactile and visual working memory content.
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