title: Oculomotor selection underlies feature retention in visual working memory.
abstract: Oculomotor selection, spatial task relevance, and visual working memory (WM) are described as three processes highly intertwined and sustained by similar cortical structures. However, because task-relevant locations always constitute potential saccade targets, no study so far has been able to distinguish between oculomotor selection and spatial task relevance. We designed an experiment that allowed us to dissociate in humans the contribution of task relevance, oculomotor selection, and oculomotor execution to the retention of feature representations in WM. We report that task relevance and oculomotor selection lead to dissociable effects on feature WM maintenance. In a first task, in which an object's location was encoded as a saccade target, its feature representations were successfully maintained in WM, whereas they declined at nonsaccade target locations. Likewise, we observed a similar WM benefit at the target of saccades that were prepared but never executed. In a second task, when an object's location was marked as task relevant but constituted a nonsaccade target (a location to avoid), feature representations maintained at that location did not benefit. Combined, our results demonstrate that oculomotor selection is consistently associated with WM, whereas task relevance is not. This provides evidence for an overlapping circuitry serving saccade target selection and feature-based WM that can be dissociated from processes encoding task-relevant locations.
authors.affiliation: Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany; and Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, Department Biologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Planegg-Martinsried, Germany hanning.nina@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Nina M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Hanning
authors.affiliation: Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany; and.
authors.forename: Donatas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Jonikaitis
authors.affiliation: Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany; and.
authors.forename: Heiner
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Deubel
authors.affiliation: Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany; and.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Szinte
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012438:Saccades; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: saccade; task relevance; visual feature; working memory