A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity.

ABSTRACT: Working memory and conscious perception are thought to share similar brain mechanisms, yet recent reports of non-conscious working memory challenge this view. Combining visual masking with magnetoencephalography, we investigate the reality of non-conscious working memory and dissect its neural mechanisms. In a spatial delayed-response task, participants reported the location of a subjectively unseen target above chance-level after several seconds. Conscious perception and conscious working memory were characterized by similar signatures: a sustained desynchronization in the alpha/beta band over frontal cortex, and a decodable representation of target location in posterior sensors. During non-conscious working memory, such activity vanished. Our findings contradict models that identify work

SUBMITTER: Trubutschek D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5589417 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature