Selección descendente de la memoria de trabajo visual apoyada por redes oscilatorias sincronizadas en fase de banda...

Visual working memory (VWM) maintenance depends on oscillatory network dynamics across multiple frequency bands throughout fronto-parietal and sensory brain areas. However, whether these networks reflect the active maintenance of visual information content or serve top-down control processes has remained unresolved. To address this, we used concurrent magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) to measure brain activity during VWM tasks, in which the memory content was parametrically controlled. Using new edge-level analysis for source-connectivity networks, we disentangled connections and subnetworks underlying the maintenance of specific contents from those supporting feature-general VWM. We show here that long-range high-alpha band (α, 11-13 Hz) phase-synchronization networks carry out a dual role in these VWM functions. α-band subgraphs localized to the visual areas are feature-selective and maintain the contents of VWM. In contrast, the high α-band subgraph in the fronto-parietal areas was shared across memory contents, suggesting that it forms the content-agnostic executive core of VWM. We propose that α-band synchronization across distinct, but yet interconnected, subgraphs support the active maintenance of feature representations and their top-down selection.