Lateralized alpha oscillations are irrelevant for the behavioral retro-cueing benefit in visual working memory

PeerJ

article

Wanja A. Mössing¹  Niko A. Busch¹ 

[1] Institute of Psychology, University of Münster;Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Münster

关键词: Neural oscillations;    Alpha rhythm;    Alpha lateralization;    Visual attention;    Vision;    Working memory;    Hemispheric lateralization;    Retro-cue;    Short term memory;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.9398

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

The limited capacity of visual working memory (vWM) necessitates the efficient allocation of available resources by prioritizing relevant over irrelevant items. Retro-cues, which inform about the future relevance of items after encoding has already finished, can improve the quality of memory representations of the relevant items. A candidate mechanism of this retro-cueing benefit is lateralization of neural oscillations in the alpha-band, but its precise role is still debated. The relative decrease of alpha power contralateral to the relevant items has been interpreted as supporting inhibition of irrelevant distractors or as supporting maintenance of relevant items. Here, we aimed at resolving this debate by testing how the magnitude of alpha-band lateralization affects behavioral performance: does stronger lateralization improve the precision of the relevant memory or does it reduce the biasing influence of the irrelevant distractor? We found that it does neither: while the data showed a clear retro-cue benefit and a biasing influence of non-target items as well as clear cue-induced alpha-band lateralization, the magnitude of this lateralization was not correlated with any performance parameter. This finding may indicate that alpha-band lateralization, which is typically observed in response to mnemonic cues, indicates an automatic shift of attention that only coincides with, but is not directly involved in mnemonic prioritization.

【 授权许可】

CC BY