September 2024
Volume 24, Issue 10
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2024
Introspection of relative uncertainty of neural working memory representations in human cortex
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Yanming (Alison) li
    University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Daniel Thayer
  • Thomas Sprague
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  Research was sponsored in part by the U.S. Army Research Office and accomplished under contract W911NF-19-D-0001 for the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, an Alfred P Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and a University of California, Santa Barbara Academic Senate Research Grant
Journal of Vision September 2024, Vol.24, 1264. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.1264
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      Yanming (Alison) li, Daniel Thayer, Thomas Sprague; Introspection of relative uncertainty of neural working memory representations in human cortex. Journal of Vision 2024;24(10):1264. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.1264.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Working memory (WM) is the ability to maintain and manipulate a limited amount of information over a short time. Previous research has shown that noisy activation patterns in retinotopic cortex during a WM delay period encode both the memorized feature and the uncertainty regarding how accurately it is represented (Li et al., 2021; Geurts et al, 2022), and that participants can accurately introspect which of several representations they can report most precisely (Fougnie et al, 2012; Suchow et al, 2017; Li & Sprague, 2023). However, how participants read out the relative uncertainty for multiple WM representations from neural activity patterns remains unclear. Here, we acquired fMRI data during a memory guided saccade task in which participants remembered 1 or 2 locations over a 12 s delay period and reported the location of one item with a saccade. Extending our previous study (Li & Sprague, 2023), on each trial, at the end of the delay period participants were either instructed to report a cued item or choose the item they believed they remembered best with a saccade. After the memory report, participants reported their uncertainty about the reported location by adjusting the extent of an arc (as in Li et al, 2021). Results showed that when participants were asked to report their best-remembered item, recall error and uncertainty were both lower compared to randomly-cued trials, consistent with accurate introspection of the relative quality of multiple WM representations. Moreover, delay-period WM representations reconstructed from activation patterns in extrastriate cortex were stronger for memory items reported on “report best” trials as compared to the non-reported item. These findings suggest that participants can simultaneously compare and report the quality of multiple remembered locations, and demonstrate that these reports are based on the quality of neural WM representations in retinotopic cortex.

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