The neural basis of complex audiovisual objects maintenances in working memory

Working memory research has primarily concentrated on studying our senses separately; the neural basis of maintaining information from multiple sensory modalities in working memory has been not well elucidated. It is debated whether multisensory information is maintained in the form of modality-specific representations or amodal representations. The present study investigated what brain regions were engaged in both types of complex audiovisual objects maintenances (semantically congruent and incongruent) using functional magnetic resonance imaging and conjunction analysis, and examined in which form to maintain multisensory objects information in working memory. The conjunction analysis showed that there was common brain regions activation involving left parietal cortex (e.g., left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus) while maintaining semantically congruent audiovisual object, whereas the common brain regions activation including the bilateral angular, left superior parietal lobule, and left middle temporal gyrus was found during maintaining semantically incongruent audiovisual objects. Importantly, the shared conjoint brain regions activation consists of bilateral angular gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus was observed while maintaining both types of semantically congruent and incongruent complex audiovisual objects. These brain regions may play different role while maintaining these complex multisensory objects, such as supramodel storage per se and intentional attention. The findings of the present studymight support the amodal view that working memory has a central storage system to maintain multisensory information from different sensory inputs.