Investigating Visual Working Memory Pointer-System

ABSTRACT

Visual working memory (VWM) holds a limited amount of information in an online state, ready to be accessed by high-level cognitive functions. One unique function of VWM, is that it can actively modify the represented information to reflect changes in a dynamic environment or the task goals. To access and update its representations, VWM relies on a pointer system: a set of unique mappings between each VWM representation and a corresponding object in the environment. This pointer system is assumed to be a low-level spatial index that simply follows the number of perceived objects, but it was never directly investigated. In this talk, I will present behavioral and neural methods that allow direct manipulation of VWM pointers. These manipulations reveal that in contrast to previous arguments, the pointers are objects based, they are independent of each other and are sensitive to high-level cognition