Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 49, Issue 6, May 2011, Pages 1569-1577
Neuropsychologia

Modulation of working-memory maintenance by directed attention

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.03.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Many current models of working memory (WM) emphasize a close relationship between WM and attention. Recently it was demonstrated that attention can be dynamically and voluntarily oriented to items held in WM, and it was suggested that directed attention can modulate the maintenance of specific WM representations. Here we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the effects of orienting attention to a category of stimuli when participants maintained a variable number of faces and scenes in WM. Retro-cues that indicated the relevant stimulus type for the subsequent WM test modulated maintenance-related activity in extrastriate areas preferentially responsive to face or scene stimuli – fusiform and parahippocampal gyri respectively – in a categorical way. After the retro-cue, the activity level in these areas was larger for the cued category in a load-independent way, suggesting the modulation may also reflect anticipation of the probe stimulus. Activity in associative parietal and prefrontal cortices was also modulated by retro-cues, and additionally co-varied with the number of stimuli of the relevant stimulus category that was being maintained. The findings suggest that these associative areas participate in maintaining the relevant memoranda in a flexible and goal-directed way to guide future behaviour.

Introduction

The ability to maintain task-relevant representations in working memory (WM) is of critical importance for many cognitive tasks. Adaptive behaviour relies on flexible access and manipulation of these representations, and also requires prioritizing of particular items in WM in light of changing task goals and expectations. Recent studies have demonstrated that such prioritization can be controlled flexibly by means of directing attention to the internal representation of an item stored in WM (Bays and Husain, 2008, Griffin and Nobre, 2003, Landman et al., 2003).

Many models of WM propose a close relationship between WM and attention (Awh and Jonides, 2001, Courtney, 2004, Cowan, 1988, Curtis and D’Esposito, 2003, Fuster, 2000, Jonides et al., 2008, McElree, 2006, Passingham and Sakai, 2004, Postle, 2006). On the neural level, a prevailing account suggests that top-down signals from prefrontal areas bias activity in posterior regions to maintain, monitor, and/or manipulate information in WM (Awh and Jonides, 2001, Curtis and D’Esposito, 2003, Harrison and Tong, 2009), in close analogy to attentional top-down signals biasing activity in visual areas during perception (Desimone and Duncan, 1995, Kastner and Ungerleider, 2001, Treue, 2003). Directly supporting this notion, a recent study demonstrated that the activity during maintenance in sensory areas was modulated as a consequence of attentional orienting towards the type of information represented in this area. These effects were linked to improved retrieval of attended relative to unattended items, and suggest a direct influence of attentional orienting on the maintenance of the items themselves (Lepsien & Nobre, 2007).

However, other brain areas beyond the sensory cortices may also be involved in representing task-relevant items in WM. Representations in higher order areas may be expected to be less tied to the specific perceptual nature of the stimuli and to be flexibly modulated according to task goals. Key candidate regions are the posterior parietal (PPC) and the prefrontal cortices (PFC), which have both been shown to be sensitive to WM load (Linden et al., 2003, Rypma et al., 2002, Todd and Marois, 2004, Xu and Chun, 2006). However, it can be difficult to tease apart whether these areas play a role in WM maintenance or in complementary selective attention or executive-control functions. For example, activity in the PPC is sustained during working-memory delays (Chafee and Goldman-Rakic, 1998, Courtney et al., 1998), and is correlated with the amount of information stored in WM (Todd and Marois, 2004, Xu and Chun, 2006) and with individual differences in WM capacity (Todd & Marois, 2005). This has led to some authors to ascribe to the PPC a direct role in WM maintenance (e.g., Todd & Marois, 2004). However, other authors (Magen, Emmanouil, McMains, Kastner, & Treisman, 2009) have suggested a more attentional role for the PPC and proposed that the load-related activity in PPC reflects different attentional demands on rehearsal of information in WM rather than storage. Similarly, the PFC has been implicated in a wide range of WM-related processes, such as maintenance of task-relevant information (Courtney, 2004, Funahashi et al., 1989, Fuster and Alexander, 1971, Fuster, 1973, Goldman-Rakic, 1987), manipulation of information in WM (Petrides, 1994, D’Esposito et al., 1998, Owen et al., 1999), or other executive-control functions like monitoring multiple mnemonic representations (Petrides, 2000). PFC has also been suggested to support WM through attention-related functions. For example, Rowe, Toni, Josephs, Frackowiak, and Passingham (2000) have suggested that area 46 is associated with the selection of relevant items in WM via attention (Bledowski et al., 2009, Lebedev et al., 2004), and other authors emphasized the role of this region in protecting WM representations against distraction (Knight et al., 1999, Miller et al., 1996, Sakai et al., 2002; also referred to as ‘active maintenance’, see Miller & Cohen, 2001).

The present experiment investigated the extent to which brain activity in perceptual and high-level brain areas involved in maintaining items in WM is flexibly modulated by changes in the task relevance of the memoranda. Attentional orienting to specific categories of stimuli being maintained in WM (faces or scenes) was manipulated by presenting retro-cues during the maintenance period, which indicated the category of stimuli that would be relevant to perform a subsequent comparison judgement to a probe item (Griffin and Nobre, 2003, Lepsien and Nobre, 2007). In each trial, participants viewed four items to be held in WM, from a variable and complementary (1–3) number of faces and scenes. Upon the presentation of a retro-cue indicating the relevant stimulus category, the effective load of task-relevant memoranda was reduced to 1–3. If it is possible to adapt WM maintenance flexibly by orienting attention to the relevant items, the load-related activity before and after attentional allocation should differ, and should be expressed in brain areas coding for the effective load of relevant items in WM (‘effective WM load’).

In addition, investigating the interaction between attention to a stimulus category and different levels of WM load for each category provides an elegant way to demonstrate more directly the effect of attentional orienting on WM maintenance. Lepsien and Nobre (2007) previously demonstrated that orienting attention to one stimulus category modulates stimulus-specific activity during the maintenance period. However, it is increasingly clear that the mere expectation of a probe stimulus of the relevant stimulus category can also modulate activity in higher order visual areas processing these stimuli (Esterman and Yantis, 2010, Puri et al., 2009, Stokes et al., 2009). Accordingly, it could be argued that the retro-cue manipulation used by Lepsien and Nobre (2007) could also have caused anticipation of an upcoming probe in addition to or instead of modulation of WM maintenance. If, however, attentional orienting were to result in graded changes of activity that tracked the effective WM load, this would be difficult to explain by mere anticipation.

Section snippets

Participants

Eighteen healthy volunteers took part in two experimental sessions (aged 18–33 (mean 22.4), six female, normal or corrected-to-normal vision). Data sets of six participants were partly lost due to technical failures of the fMRI scanner, thus only the data of twelve participants were entered into the analysis. Participants gave written informed consents. The study protocol had approval from the Oxfordshire Research Ethics Committee (06/Q1606/70).

Stimuli

The stimuli comprised 120 faces and 120 scenes

Behavioural results

The behavioural results are summarized in Fig. 2. To investigate the effects of the retro-cue on the performance in the delayed-match-to-sample task, mean reaction time (RT) and accuracy (AC) were analysed with repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with the factors cue (face, scene) and array type (1F/3S, 2F/2S, 3F/1S). Only trials with correct responses were entered into the RT analysis. Trials with RTs deviating more than 3 standard deviations from the condition mean were considered

Discussion

The present experiment probed the flexibility of WM representations, and investigated if activity in perceptual and high-level brain areas involved in WM maintenance can be modulated according to the task-relevance of the items held on-line. Cueing attention to a subset of items in WM, tagging them as relevant for subsequent probe comparison, resulted in an enhancement in WM performance, which increased linearly as the number of items in the focus of attention decreased. On the neural level,

Conclusion

The present study provides behavioural and neural evidence that subsets of items held on-line in WM can be highlighted as task-relevant by orienting attention towards them. A network of prefrontal and parietal areas directly reflected the changes of the effective WM load in a systematic fashion, suggesting that these areas directly contribute to the (active) maintenance of information in WM.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the OCMR for the help with data acquisition. The research was funded by 21st Century Research Award: Bridging Brain, Mind and Behaviour to Anna C. Nobre by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

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