ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Action similarity warps visual feature space in working memory.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Motor working memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Motor Control Processes Moderate Visual Working Memory Gating.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Action similarity warps visual feature space in working memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Visual working memory (VWM) retains representations of past visual information for future action. Yet to date, most studies have approached VWM as just serving perception beyond the immediate. Whether and how prospective actions shape information in VWM remains largely unknown, in part because typical experimental setups limit behavior to simple button presses. In two experiments (one preregistered), using a novel interactive VWM task, we show that the similarity of the actions that we intend to perform on memory items adaptively distorts their representation. Participants memorized the orientation of two bars, after which they were informed as to which manual actions they should reproduce these orientations with in a memory recall test. We observed that perceptually similar items were remembered as more distinct when paired with different action plans versus the same action plan. A control experiment showed that this action-induced effect reflects a true change in the visual representation rather than a motor bias. These findings demonstrate that VWM representations are flexibly adapted to guide specific overt actions and provide evidence that action plans can retrospectively warp sensory feature space in VWM.
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.