Paper Info
Title
On the contribution of motor planning to the retroactive cuing benefit in working memory: Evidence by mu and beta oscillatory activity in the EEG.
Abstract
Attention can be allocated toward mental representations in working memory also after the initial encoding of information has been completed. It was shown that focusing on only one item within working memory transfers this representation into a protected state, reducing its susceptibility to interference by incoming signals. The present study investigated the nature of this retroactive cue (retro-cue) benefit by means of oscillatory activity in the EEG. In a working memory task with a retro-cue indicating one, two or three memory representations as relevant and a block-wise distractor display presented after the retro-cue, participants had to remember the orientation of a colored bar. On behavioral level, we found that the interfering effect of the distractor display on memory performance could be prevented when a retro-cue reduced the number of attended representations in working memory. However, only the one-item retro-cue led to an overall increase in task performance compared to a condition without a retro-cue. The neural basis of this special representational status was investigated by means of oscillatory parameters in the EEG and a clustering approach on level of the independent components (ICs) in the signal. The retroactive reduction of attended working memory representations was reflected in a suppression of alpha power over right parietal and parieto-occipital sites. In addition, we found that an IC cluster representing oscillatory activity in the mu/beta range (10–12 Hz and 20–24 Hz) with a source in sensorimotor cortex revealed a power suppression already prior to the memory probe following the one-item retro-cue. This suggests that the retro-cue benefit results in large parts from the possibility to focus attention on one particular item in working memory and initiate motor planning processes already ahead of the probe stimulus indicating the respective response.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.08.057
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Working memory,Attention,Retro-cue,Alpha oscillation,Mu/beta suppression,Motor planning
Developmental psychology,Visual short-term memory,Working memory,Psychology,Visual memory,Cognitive psychology,Stimulus (physiology),Spatial memory,Electroencephalography,Encoding (memory),Mental representation
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
162
1053-8119
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.74
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniel Schneider131.08
Anna Barth230.74
Edmund Wascher3114.35