Abstract
Demands on visuospatial working memory are a ubiquitous part of everyday life. As such, significant efforts have been made to understand how the brain responds to these demands in real-world environments. Multiple brain imaging studies have highlighted a fronto-parietal cortical network that underlies visuospatial working memory, is modulated by cognitive load, and that appears to respond uniquely to encoding versus retrieval components. Furthermore, multiple studies have identified functional connectivity in regions of the fronto-parietal network during working memory tasks. Together, these findings have helped outline important aspects of the neural architecture that underlies visuospatial working memory. Here, we provide results from the first fNIRS-based investigation of fronto-parietal signatures of cortical activation and functional connectivity during a computer-based visuospatial working memory task. Our results indicate that the local maxima of cortical activation and functional coherence do not necessarily overlap spatially, and that cortical activation is significantly more susceptible to task-specific demands compared to functional connectivity. These results highlight important and novel information regarding neurotypical signatures of cortical activation and functional connectivity during visuospatial working memory. Our findings also demonstrate the utility of fNIRS for interrogating these cognitive processes.
Highlights
The everyday world is wrought with demands on our visuospatial working memory
Participant’s performance on the just noticeable difference (JND) estimation task shows a clear and significant drop in task accuracy for probe trials compared to both “No change” (p = .0008, Cohen’s d = 1.8) and “Obvious change” (p < .0001, Cohen’s d = 2.19) trials (Fig 4A)
The findings from our study highlight a dissociation between patterns of cortical activation and functional coherence in the frontal-parietal cortices when demands are placed on the visuospatial working memory system
Summary
The everyday world is wrought with demands on our visuospatial working memory. Accurate visuospatial representation of those objects in working memory allows us to navigate our car through traffic, while reaching for our coffee without incident. This is possible because of highly evolved and specialized cognitive abilities that allow us to successfully negotiate these demands, most of the time. Brain science researchers interested in the biological underpinnings of these processes have worked to elucidate the neural foundations of visuospatial working memory in humans.
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