Manipulating attentional priority creates a trade-off between memory and sensory representations in human visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: People often remember visual information over brief delays while actively engaging with ongoing inputs from the surrounding visual environment. Depending on the situation, one might prioritize mnemonic contents (i.e., remembering details of a past event), or preferentially attend sensory inputs (i.e., minding traffic while crossing a street). Previous fMRI work has shown that early sensory regions can simultaneously represent both mnemonic and passively viewed sensory information. Here we test the limits of such simultaneity by manipulating attention towards sensory distractors during a working memory task performed by human subjects during fMRI scanning. Participants remembered the orientation of a target grating while a distractor grating was shown during the middle portion of the memory

SUBMITTER: Rademaker RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11429711 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature