Environmental cues enable the brain to anticipate and prepare for upcoming behavior, such as by selectively prioritizing relevant visual representations and associated action plans in working memory i...

Mental representations are the explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences, but there is no widely accepted characterization of how they cause behavior. Visual representational geometry can be quantified by similarity scores, but almost all methods require an explicit judgment. To examine how representations cause behavior by varying task demands, observers must perform different tasks while continuously reporting similarity, leading to dual-task interference. This study develops scanpaths as an implicit similarity measure, and uses representational similarity analysis to validate it. Observers searched for a target; fixations on distractors may reveal similarity. Similarity was also quantified by an odd-one-out task in the same participants, and ratings from different participants (Jiang et al. 2022). Representational geometries between tasks correlated. A generative model predicted first fixations in novel data. This double validation of the scanpath method opens the door to examining the causality of representations by determining if and how they vary with task demands. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Statistical learning guide attention by shaping anticipatory oculomotor behavior. Here, the authors show that microsaccades are biased to expected distractor locations before stimulus onset and predic...

The human medial temporal lobe (MTL) is critical for declarative memory by forming sparse, concept-based neural codes. While sparse coding has long be…

To solve diverse real-world tasks, the brain must flexibly switch between task rules and adjust computations. Recent advances in analyzing neural data and modeling neural networks have revealed their ...

Flexible decision-making in uncertain environments requires inferring the relevant context and focusing on behaviourally relevant information. We tested the hypothesis that the brain supports this pro...

People often need to remember unique details while also finding connections across experiences. Here, the authors show that the brain flexibly links related events while preserving their distinct feat...

Abstract. Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information. Contrary to the common assumption that the capacity of this system is…

By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...

Flexible prioritization in working memory (WM) is supported by neural oscillations in frontal and sensory brain areas, but the roles of different oscillations remain poorly understood. Recordings in h...

Large-scale brain activity patterns coordinate goals, perception, and memory to guide efficient visual search.

Cell Research - A neuronal basis for mental imagery

Attention facilitates stimulus processing by selecting specific locations (spatial attention) or features (feature-based attention). It can be sustained on a given location or feature, or re-oriented ...

ALT: Man Taking Selfie with Flash Camera

Nature Reviews Psychology - It is often asserted that human cognition is Bayesian, but that broad claim is difficult to test in a falsifiable way. We suggest that researchers specifically assess a...

Perception is increasingly viewed as an inferential process wherein sensory inputs are integrated with prior expectations. We employed time-resolved decoding on electroencephalography (EEG) data ( n  ...

Abstract. Recent theory on the neural basis of working memory (WM) has attributed an important role to “activity-silent” or -quiescent mechanisms, suggesting that sustained neural activity might not be essential in the retention of information. This idea has been challenged by reports of ongoing neural activity in the alpha band during WM maintenance, however. The precise role of these alpha oscillations is unclear: Do they reflect attentional prioritization of stored information, or do they serve as a general maintenance mechanism, for instance to periodically refresh synaptic traces? To address this, we designed a visual WM task involving two memory items, one of which was prioritized by being tested first for recall. The task included both short (1 second) and long (3 seconds) delay intervals between encoding and retrieval. The long delay condition allowed us to test whether the alpha-based decoding effects persist beyond the early delay period, thereby putting accounts that attribute alpha activity to generic maintenance processes to the test. Time-resolved decoding analyses revealed that both tested-first and tested-second items were initially decodable following stimulus presentation. However, only the tested-first item exhibited sustained decodability throughout the delay, particularly in the long delay condition, where it transitioned into a stable coding scheme. This prolonged representation was selectively supported by induced alpha power, which reliably tracked the prioritized tested-first item, but not the deprioritized tested-second item. Impulse-based decoding further confirmed this asymmetry, showing a selective increase in readout for the tested-second item only when it became immediately task relevant. Together, these findings suggest that sustained alpha-band activity primarily reflects attentional prioritization, rather than general memory maintenance. Unattended, deprioritized items appear to transition into an activity-quiescent state, consistent with models of synaptic storage in WM.

Pupil size in people with synesthesia changed depending on how bright or dark the perceived colors were.

We show you colors. You recreate them from memory. Challenge friends to beat your score. It's harder than you think. Play free at dialed.gg.