Causal evidence for subliminal percept-to-memory interference in early visual cortex

Abstract

There has been recent interest in the neural correlates of visual short-term memory (VSTM) interference by irrelevant perceptual input. These studies, however, presented distracters that were subjected to conscious scrutiny by participants thus strongly involving attentional control mechanisms. In order to minimize the role of attentional control and to investigate interference occurring at the level of sensory representations, we developed a paradigm in which a subliminal visual distracter is presented during the delay period of a visual short-term memory task requiring the maintenance of stimulus orientation. This subliminal distracter could be either congruent or incongruent with the orientation of the memory item. Behavioral results showed that the intervening distracter affected the fidelity of VSTM when it was incongruent with the memory cue. We then assessed the causal role of the early visual cortex in this interaction by using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We found that occipital TMS impaired the fidelity VSTM content in the absence of the memory mask. Interestingly, TMS facilitated VSTM performance in the presence of a subliminal memory mask that was incongruent with the memory content. Signal detection analyses indicated that TMS did not modulate perceptual sensitivity of the masked distracter. That the impact of TMS on the precision of VSTM was dissociated by the presence vs. absence of a subliminal perceptual distracter and its congruency with the VSTM content provides causal evidence for the view that competitive interactions between memory and perception can occur at the earliest cortical stages of visual processing.