Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on November 10, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(9):2072-2083; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl116
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Attentional Modulation of Object Representations in Working Memory
Brain & Cognition Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK
Address correspondence to Jöran Lepsien, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstraße 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. Email: lepsien{at}cbs.mpg.de.
We investigated the role of object-based attention in modulating the maintenance of faces and scenes held online in working memory (WM). Participants had to remember a face and a scene, while cues presented during the delay instructed them to orient their attention to one or the other item. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that orienting attention in WM modulated the activity in fusiform and parahippocampal gyri, involved in maintaining representations of faces and scenes respectively. Measures from complementary behavioral studies indicated that this increase in activity corresponded to improved WM performance. The results show that directed attention can modulate maintenance of specific representations in WM, and help define the interplay between the domains of attention and WM.
Key Words: attention fMRI maintenance mental representations working memory
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