title: Within-Category Decoding of Information in Different Attentional States in Short-Term Memory.
abstract: A long-standing assumption of cognitive neuroscience has been that working memory (WM) is accomplished by sustained, elevated neural activity. More recently, theories of WM have expanded this view by describing different attentional states in WM with differing activation levels. Several studies have used multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) data to study neural activity corresponding to these WM states. Intriguingly, no evidence was found for active neural representations for information held in WM outside the focus of attention ("unattended memory items," UMIs), suggesting that only attended memory items (AMIs) are accompanied by an active trace. However, these results depended on category-level decoding, which lacks sensitivity to neural representations of individual items. Therefore, we employed a WM task in which subjects remembered the directions of motion of two dot arrays, with a retrocue indicating which was relevant for an imminent memory probe (the AMI). This design allowed MVPA decoding of delay-period fMRI signal at the stimulus-item level, affording a more sensitive test of the neural representation of UMIs. Whereas evidence for the AMI was reliably high, evidence for the UMI dropped to baseline, consistent with the notion that different WM attentional states may have qualitatively different mechanisms of retention.
authors.affiliation: Medical Scientist Training Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53726, USA.|Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
authors.forename: Joshua J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: LaRocque
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,  Madison, WI 53726, USA.
authors.forename: Adam C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Riggall
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, L2S 3A1, Canada.
authors.forename: Stephen M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Emrich
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.|Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,  Madison, WI 53726, USA.
authors.forename: Bradley R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Postle
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: attention; multivariate pattern analysis; neural representations; short-term memory; working memory