An Electrophysiological Dissociation of Encoding vs. Maintenance Failures in Visual-Spatial Working Memory.

ABSTRACT: Working memory (WM) performance varies substantially among individuals but the precise contribution of different WM component processes to these functional limits remains unclear. By analyzing different types of responses in a spatial WM task, we recently demonstrated a functional dissociation between confident and not-confident errors reflecting failures of WM encoding and maintenance, respectively. Here, we use event-related brain potentials to further explore this dissociation. Healthy participants performed a delayed orientation-discrimination task and rated their response confidence for each trial. The encoding-related N2pc component was significantly reduced for confident errors compared to confident correct responses, which is indicative of an encoding failure. In contrast, the main

SUBMITTER: Mayer JS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7105797 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature