Abstract
Working memory (WM) is the key process linking perception to action. Several lines of research have, accordingly, highlighted WM's engagement in sensori-motor associations between retrospective stimuli and future behavior. Using human fMRI we investigated whether prior information about the effector used to respond in a WM task would have an impact on the way the same sensory stimulus is maintained in memory despite a behavioral response could not be readily planned. We focused on WM-related activity in posterior parietal cortex during the maintenance of spatial items for a subsequent match-to-sample comparison, which was reported either with a verbal or with a manual response. We expected WM activity to be higher for manual response trials, because of posterior parietal cortex's engagement in both spatial WM and hand movement preparation. Increased fMRI activity for manual response trials in bilateral anterior intraparietal sulcus confirmed our expectations. These results imply that the maintenance of sensory material in WM is optimized for motor context, i.e. for the effector that will be relevant in the upcoming behavioral responses.
Highlights
Working memory (WM) is the key cognitive process that allows bridging between previously encountered sensory information and future action
We modelled the cue-period (+mask) but only considered two regressors representing our two principle tasks (M2ST & control task (CT))
A limitation of our own study is that, so far, we have shown effector-dependent differences in WM maintenance only for spatial items and only in posterior parietal cortex (PPC), a region crucially involved in processing spatial information [11, 14, 21, 29]
Summary
Working memory (WM) is the key cognitive process that allows bridging between previously encountered sensory information and future action. The detailed WM processing architecture and its underlying neuronal substrates still remain somewhat elusive [1, 2]. The traditional view on working memory architecture, which builds on Baddeley’s and Hitch’s multicomponent model, thereby assumes that the sensory information is maintained within domain-specific modules, namely the visuomotor sketchpad, the phonological loop, or the episodic buffer [3].
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