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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 13, 2026

The Attentional Set Shifting Task: A Measure of Cognitive Flexibility in Mice

The Attentional Set Shifting Task: A Measure of Cognitive Flexibility in Mice

Published on: February 4, 2015

Intermodal Attention Shifts in Multimodal Working Memory.

Tobias Katus¹, Anna Grubert², Martin Eimer

¹University of London.

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

|October 30, 2016

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Top-down attention flexibly controls working memory (WM) by modulating sensory brain regions. This research shows that attention prioritizes task-relevant information, whether tactile or visual, optimizing multimodal working memory for specific goals.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroscience of Attention
Working Memory Research

Background:

Attention is crucial for maintaining information in working memory (WM).
The brain's ability to prioritize sensory information from different modalities (e.g., touch and sight) within WM is not fully understood.
Top-down control mechanisms, driven by behavioral goals, are hypothesized to regulate this process.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if attention-based maintenance of tactile and visual information in working memory is flexibly controlled by top-down mechanisms.
To examine how behavioral goals influence the attentional activation of different sensory representations in multimodal working memory.
To determine if modality-specific maintenance processes are modulated by goal-directed attention.

Main Methods:

Concurrent measurement of tactile (tCDA) and visual contralateral delay activity (CDA) to track attentional activation.
Presentation of simultaneous tactile and visual stimuli in different spatial locations.
Use of an auditory retrocue to indicate task-relevant modality (tactile or visual) for subsequent comparison.

Main Results:

Distinct ERP components (tCDA and CDA) reflected the maintenance of tactile and visual information, respectively.
Retrocues signaling task-irrelevant modalities led to reduced tCDA and CDA components.
Modulations of tCDA and CDA by cues were similar across modalities and independent of the number of initially encoded stimuli.

Conclusions:

Modality-specific maintenance of information in sensory brain regions is flexibly modulated by top-down attentional control.
These top-down influences optimize multimodal working memory representations according to behavioral goals.
The findings highlight the adaptive nature of attention in managing sensory information for effective task performance.