Citation

Thigpen N, Petro NM, Oschwald J, Oberauer K, Keil A. Psychol. Sci. 2019; ePub(ePub): 956797619854067.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Florida.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797619854067

PMID

31322983

Abstract

How does the content of visual working memory influence the way we process the visual environment? We addressed this question using the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), which provides a discernible measure of visuocortical activation to multiple stimuli simultaneously. Fifty-six adults were asked to remember a set of two oriented gratings. During the retention interval, two frequency-tagged oriented gratings were presented to probe the visuocortical processing of matching versus mismatching orientations relative to the memory set. Matching probes prompted an increased visuocortical response, whereas mismatching stimuli were suppressed. This suggests that the visual cortex prioritizes attentional selection of memory-relevant features at the expense of non-memory-relevant features. When two memory items were probed simultaneously, visuocortical amplification alternated between the two stimuli at a rate of 3 Hz to 4 Hz, consistent with the rate of attentional sampling of sensory events from the external world. These results suggest a serial, single-item attentional sampling of remembered features.

Language: en

Keywords

attention; electrophysiology; memory; open data; open materials; perception; visual memory