Abstract
Traversing everyday sensory environments often requires representing information about relevant features or objects in memory while simultaneously processing new sensory inputs. Although early visual cortex demonstrates persistent modulation of featureselective neural responses during short term memory maintenance, recent work suggests that visual cortex can only represent the contents of memory, or the characteristics of new sensory inputs, but not both. Here we provide evidence that population-level response patterns in visual cortex can concurrently represent information about the contents of short term memory alongside the specific features of new sensory inputs. This multiplexing capacity in classic 'sensory' areas may support a local circuit for computing a 'match' signal between behaviorally relevant but no longer visible features, and new sensory stimuli.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018