title: Deployment of spatial attention towards locations in memory representations. An EEG study.
abstract: Recalling information from visual short-term memory (VSTM) involves the same neural mechanisms as attending to an actually perceived scene. In particular, retrieval from VSTM has been associated with orienting of visual attention towards a location within a spatially-organized memory representation. However, an open question concerns whether spatial attention is also recruited during VSTM retrieval even when performing the task does not require access to spatial coordinates of items in the memorized scene. The present study combined a visual search task with a modified, delayed central probe protocol, together with EEG analysis, to answer this question. We found a temporal contralateral negativity (TCN) elicited by a centrally presented go-signal which was spatially uninformative and featurally unrelated to the search target and informed participants only about a response key that they had to press to indicate a prepared target-present vs. -absent decision. This lateralization during VSTM retrieval (TCN) provides strong evidence of a shift of attention towards the target location in the memory representation, which occurred despite the fact that the present task required no spatial (or featural) information from the search to be encoded, maintained, and retrieved to produce the correct response and that the go-signal did not itself specify any information relating to the location and defining feature of the target.
authors.affiliation: Deptartment of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany ; Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
authors.forename: Marcin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Leszczyński
authors.affiliation: Deptartment of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany ; Institute for Cognitive Systems, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Agnieszka
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wykowska
authors.affiliation: Deptartment of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany ; Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, LMU, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Jairo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Perez-Osorio
authors.affiliation: Deptartment of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany ; Birkbeck College, University of London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Hermann J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Müller
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D013037:Spatial Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult