Abstract
Visual working memory provides an essential link between past and future events. Despite recent efforts, capacity limits, their genesis and the underlying neural structures of visual working memory remain unclear. Here we show that performance in visual working memory - but not iconic visual memory - can be predicted by the strength of mental imagery as assessed with binocular rivalry in a given individual. In addition, for individuals with strong imagery, modulating the background luminance diminished performance on visual working memory and imagery tasks, but not working memory for number strings. This suggests that luminance signals were disrupting sensory-based imagery mechanisms and not a general working memory system. Individuals with poor imagery still performed above chance in the visual working memory task, but their performance was not affected by the background luminance, suggesting a dichotomy in strategies for visual working memory: individuals with strong mental imagery rely on sensory-based imagery to support mnemonic performance, while those with poor imagery rely on different strategies. These findings could help reconcile current controversy regarding the mechanism and location of visual mnemonic storage.
Highlights
The study of working memory has long been an area of interest for researchers due to its ubiquity in daily life, its close links to many high-level cognitive functions, psychopathologies [1] and the large individual variability present in both performance and capacity [2,3,4]
Behavioural studies support the involvement of early visual cortex, as they suggests that visual working memory can maintain visual information at a resolution typically only observed in early visual cortex [14,15,16,17,18]
Interference style tasks provide evidence that imagery may be involved in maintaining visual information in memory with some studies indicating that visual interference in the form of irrelevant pictures and dynamic visual noise deteriorates performance on both visual working memory and imagery tasks [20,35,36,37,38,39,40]
Summary
The study of working memory has long been an area of interest for researchers due to its ubiquity in daily life, its close links to many high-level cognitive functions, psychopathologies [1] and the large individual variability present in both performance and capacity [2,3,4]. Behavioural studies support the involvement of early visual cortex, as they suggests that visual working memory can maintain visual information at a resolution typically only observed in early visual cortex [14,15,16,17,18]. Interference style tasks provide evidence that imagery may be involved in maintaining visual information in memory with some studies indicating that visual interference in the form of irrelevant pictures and dynamic visual noise deteriorates performance on both visual working memory and imagery tasks [20,35,36,37,38,39,40]. Other work has failed to show these effects, with some studies finding no effects of dynamic visual noise on either working memory and/or imagery tasks [41,42,43,44]
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