Oculomotor Selection Underlies Feature Retention

With oculomotor selection, spatial task relevance and visual working memory highly intertwined and sustained by similar cortical structures, how is it possible to distinguish between oculomotor selection and spatial task relevance if task relevant locations always constitute potential saccade targets? Hanning and colleagues designed an experiment to dissociate in humans the contribution of task relevance, oculomotor selection and oculomotor execution to the retention of feature representations in working memory. In this podcast, Editor-in-Chief Bill Yates (University of Pittsburgh) and Associate Editors Christos Constantinidis (Wake Forest School of Medicine) and Michele Basso (University of California at Los Angeles) join authors Nina Hanning (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Donatas Jonikaitis (Stanford University School of Medicine) in an engaging discussion about their recent work. Is there an overlapping neural circuitry serving saccade target selection and feature-based working memory that can be dissociated from processes encoding task relevant locations? Listen and find out.

Oculomotor selection underlies feature retention in visual working memory
Nina Maria Hanning, Donatas Jonikaitis, Heiner Deubel, Martin Szinte
Journal of Neurophysiology, published November 18, 2015. DOI: 10.1152/jn.00927.2015.