ArticlePLoS biology2021
Pinging the brain with visual impulses reveals electrically active, not activity-silent, working memories.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Alpha phase coding supports feature binding during working memory maintenance.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Exogenously Driven Neural Reactivation of Spatially Matching Visual Working-Memory Contents.eNeuro · 2026Article
- Retinotopic Spatial Working Memory Representations Are Not Affected by Task-irrelevant Visual Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Unattended working memory items are coded by persistent activity in human medial temporal lobe neurons.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of learned suppression uncovered by probing the hidden attentional priority map.eLife · 2025Article
- Behaviorally Irrelevant Feature Matching Increases Neural and Behavioral Working Memory Readout.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Decoding auditory working memory content from EEG aftereffects of auditory-cortical TMS.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Scanpath EEG dynamic, a new perspective for neuroaesthetic connoisseurship in paintings.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Neural dynamics of shifting attention between perception and working-memory contents.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Comparing Neural Correlates of Memory Encoding and Maintenance for Foveal and Peripheral Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Working memory expedites the processing of visual signals within the extrastriate cortex.iScience · 2024Article
- Integration of history information Drives Serial Dependence and Stabilizes Working Memory Representations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Ocular working memory signals are flexible to behavioral priority and subjective imagery strength.Journal of neurophysiology · 2024Article
- Linking Cognitive Integrity to Working Memory Dynamics in the Aging Human Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Maintenance of color memoranda in activity-quiescent working memory states: Evidence from impulse perturbation.iScience · 2024Article
- Geometry of visuospatial working memory information in miniature gaze patterns.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- No evidence that visual impulses enhance the readout of retrieved long-term memory contents from EEG activity.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Persistently active neurons during mnemonic periods have been regarded as the mechanism underlying working memory maintenance. Alternatively, neuronal networks could instead store memories in fast synaptic changes, thus avoiding the biological cost of maintaining an active code through persistent neuronal firing. Such "activity-silent" codes have been proposed for specific conditions in which memories are maintained in a nonprioritized state, as for unattended but still relevant short-term memories. A hallmark of this "activity-silent" code is that these memories can be reactivated from silent, synaptic traces. Evidence for "activity-silent" working memory storage has come from human electroencephalography (EEG), in particular from the emergence of decodability (EEG reactivations) induced by visual impulses (termed pinging) during otherwise "silent" periods. Here, we reanalyze EEG data from such pinging studies. We find that the originally reported absence of memory decoding reflects weak statistical power, as decoding is possible based on more powered analyses or reanalysis using alpha power instead of raw voltage. This reveals that visual pinging EEG "reactivations" occur in the presence of an electrically active, not silent, code for unattended memories in these data. This crucial change in the evidence provided by this dataset prompts a reinterpretation of the mechanisms of EEG reactivations. We provide 2 possible explanations backed by computational models, and we discuss the relationship with TMS-induced EEG reactivations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.