Schedule of Events | Symposia

Increased neural delay activity for simple features when they are remembered as part of real-world objects

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yong Hoon Chung¹ (yong.hoon.chung.gr@dartmouth.edu), Sadye Law¹, Timothy Brady², Viola Störmer¹; ¹Dartmouth College, ²University of California San Diego

Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information over a short duration of time. While previous studies postulated that the capacity of this system is fixed, recent research suggests that its capacity is increased for meaningful stimuli (i.e., real-world objects). Here we show that working memory performance for a simple visual feature – color – is also improved when this feature is encoded as part of a real-world object relative to an unrecognizable scrambled object. Using EEG (N = 24), we further show that this performance increase is accompanied by enhanced neural activity during the delay period (indexed by the contralateral-delay-activity), suggesting that the behavioral benefit is linked to the active maintenance process of working memory. Interestingly, we also find robust condition differences in EEG activity during the encoding period when participants are viewing the stimuli, suggesting that the meaningfulness benefit may arise during perceptual processing already. Overall, our results demonstrate that active visual working memory capacity for simple features is not fixed but can expand depending on what context these features are encoded in.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory