ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2018
Flexible Coding of Visual Working Memory Representations during Distraction.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 166 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sensory recruitment in visual short-term memory: A systematic review and meta-analysis of sensory visual cortex interference using transcranial magnetic stimulation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Pooled it
- Memory recall errors reflect interacting sensory and mnemonic representations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The oblique effect in visual working memory is enhanced by distraction, regardless of tDCS manipulations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Distractor-Induced Repulsion Effect in Visual Working Memory: A Behavioral and ERP Study.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Spatial reorganization of object representations in high-level visual cortex distinguishes working memory from perception.Science advances · 2026Article
- Color-semantic congruency boosts distractor resistance in visual working memory: an alpha-band oscillation perspective.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Retinotopic Spatial Working Memory Representations Are Not Affected by Task-irrelevant Visual Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Evidence for Abstract Codes in Parietal Cortex Guiding Prospective Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Probabilistic working memory representations in human cortex guide behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Memory recall errors reflect interacting sensory and mnemonic representations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Motor imagery in individuals with congenital aphantasia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Transient increases to apparent contrast by exogenous attention persist in visual working memory.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Article
- Signal Intrusion Explains Divergent Effects of Visual Distraction on Working Memory.Psychological science · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of Reselecting Visual and Motor Contents in Working Memory after External Interference.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Stimulus representation in human frontal cortex supports flexible control in working memory.eLife · 2025Article
- The human posterior parietal cortices orthogonalize the representation of different streams of information concurrently coded in visual working memory.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- A gradual transition toward categorical representations along the visual hierarchy during working memory, but not perception.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Comparing Neural Correlates of Memory Encoding and Maintenance for Foveal and Peripheral Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Visual working memory (VWM) recruits a broad network of brain regions, including prefrontal, parietal, and visual cortices. Recent evidence supports a "sensory recruitment" model of VWM, whereby precise visual details are maintained in the same stimulus-selective regions responsible for perception. A key question in evaluating the sensory recruitment model is how VWM representations persist through distracting visual input, given that the early visual areas that putatively represent VWM content are susceptible to interference from visual stimulation.To address this question, we used a functional magnetic resonance imaging inverted encoding model approach to quantitatively assess the effect of distractors on VWM representations in early visual cortex and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), another region previously implicated in the storage of VWM information. This approach allowed us to reconstruct VWM representations for orientation, both before and after visual interference, and to examine whether oriented distractors systematically biased these representations. In our human participants (both male and female), we found that orientation information was maintained simultaneously in early visual areas and IPS in anticipation of possible distraction, and these representations persisted in the absence of distraction. Importantly, early visual representations were susceptible to interference; VWM orientations reconstructed from visual cortex were significantly biased toward distractors, corresponding to a small attractive bias in behavior. In contrast, IPS representations did not show such a bias. These results provide quantitative insight into the effect of interference on VWM representations, and they suggest a dynamic tradeoff between visual and parietal regions that allows flexible adaptation to task demands in service of VWM.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.