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Poster F in Poster Session F: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 3:30 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Flexible remapping of working memory across gaze shifts

Deepak V Raya¹, Devarajan Sridharan¹; ¹Indian Institute of Science

Presenter: Deepak V Raya

Visual working memory (VWM) allows us to retain the identity and location of fleetingly perceived objects even after a gaze shift, but the reference frame underlying this stability remains unresolved. Prior work supports maintenance in a retinotopic (gaze-centered) reference frame, in the hemifield contralateral to the memorandum. By contrast emerging evidence indicates that interhemispheric transfer of the memory trace occurs following eye movements, suggesting a spatiotopic (world-centered) reference frame. Here, we tested whether VWM is inherently spatiotopic or flexibly adapts to task demands using a novel VWM task that encouraged maintenance in, alternatively, spatiotopic and retinotopic reference frames. Multivariate decoding of memorandum features from human electrophysiology (EEG) revealed a transfer of mnemonic representations across hemifields, selectively in the spatiotopic context. This transfer was accompanied by increased interhemispheric high-theta (5–8 Hz) coherence. Critically, VWM precision (psychometric slope) improved with stronger transfer, in the spatiotopic condition alone. Together, these findings show that VWM representations are flexibly reconfigured based on task demands and identify neural mechanisms that putatively link gaze shifts and VWM.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures