Visual working memory items drift apart due to active, not passive, maintenance.

ABSTRACT: How are humans capable of maintaining detailed representations of visual items in memory? When required to make fine discriminations, we sometimes implicitly differentiate memory representations away from each other to reduce interitem confusion. However, this separation of representations can inadvertently lead memories to be recalled as biased away from other memory items, a phenomenon termed repulsion bias. Using a nonretinotopically specific working memory paradigm, we found stronger repulsion bias with longer working memory delays, but only when items were actively maintained. These results suggest that (a) repulsion bias can reflect a mnemonic phenomenon, distinct from perceptually driven observations of repulsion bias; and (b) mnemonic repulsion bias is ongoing during maintenance an

SUBMITTER: Scotti PS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8605042 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature