title: Parietal structure and function explain human variation in working memory biases of visual attention.
abstract: Recent research indicates that human attention appears inadvertently biased by items that match the contents of working memory (WM). WM-biases can lead to attentional costs when the memory content matches goal-irrelevant items and to attentional benefits when it matches the sought target. Here we used functional and structural MRI data to determine the neural basis of human variation in WM biases. We asked whether human variation in WM-benefits and WM-costs merely reflects the process of attentional capture by the contents of WM or whether variation in WM biases may be associated with distinct forms of cognitive control over internal WM signals based on selection goals. Human ability to use WM contents to facilitate selection was positively correlated with gray matter volume in the left superior posterior parietal cortex (PPC), while the ability to overcome interference by WM-matching distracters was associated with the left inferior PPC in the anterior IPS. Functional activity in the left PPC, measured by functional MRI, also predicted the magnitude of WM-costs on selection. Both structure and function of left PPC mediate the expression of WM biases in human visual attention.
authors.affiliation: Imperial College London, Division of Brain Sciences, London, UK. Electronic address: d.soto@imperial.ac.uk.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Soto
authors.affiliation: University of Birmingham, Behavioural and Brain Sciences Centre, Birmingham, UK.
authors.forename: Pia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rotshtein
authors.affiliation: University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, UK; University of Sussex, School of Psychology, UK.
authors.forename: Ryota
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kanai
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult