Schedule of Events | Symposia

Immediate reselection of visual and motor memories after external interference

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

Daniela Gresch^1,2 (daniela.gresch@yale.edu), Larissa Behnke³, Anna C. Nobre^1,2, Sage E.P. Boettcher²; ¹Yale University, ²University of Oxford, ³University of Zurich

During natural behavior, we must often maintain internal representations in working memory while concurrently engaging with perceptual events in the external world. Though previous research has demonstrated working memory to be susceptible to external interference, internal representations generally withstand such challenges without complete failure. Here, we investigated the neural dynamics underlying the reselection of internal representations after engagement with an external task. Specifically, we asked which contents of internal representations are reselected after an interrupting task and when this reselection occurs. To address these questions, we developed a visual-motor working memory task in which participants were retrospectively cued about an item during the retention interval. In most trials, after a retro-cue was presented, participants were required to respond to a perceptual discrimination task. Using electroencephalography, we tracked the reselection of visual (i.e., spatial location) and motor (i.e., response hand) representations through contra- vs. ipsilateral modulations of posterior alpha (8–12 Hz) and central beta (13–30 Hz) activity, respectively. Our findings revealed the concurrent reselection of visual and motor contents immediately after the perceptual task was completed, rather than just-in-time when internal information was required for memory-guided behavior. These findings demonstrate the early reinstatement of visual working memory into a ready-to-use state and underscore the pivotal role of visual-spatial information in scaffolding internal representations after external interference.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory