Maintaining with the Benefit of Expectation

10/26（六）

Working memory (WM) and attention often work together in a mutually supportive manner to guide flexible and adaptive behaviours. Because WM is highly limited in capacity, attention plays an important role in anticipating and gating information that is most relevant to behavioural expectations. In turn, WM controls attention by maintaining task goals, allowing attention to be directed towards items that match these goals. In this talk, I will present recent work from my lab on the interaction between WM and attention. Using EEG, MEG, and fMRI, we focus on the neural mechanisms underlying this interaction, and how it guides human behaviours. In the first section, I will present evidence showing how electrophysiological activity tracks content-specific WM capacity during the retention interval of WM. In the second section, I will demonstrate how temporal expectation based on duration variability can modulate the neural dynamics of alpha oscillations that precede the onset of the memory test. In the final section, I will introduce a MEG-fMRI fusion approach and explain how we apply this method to investigate spatiotemporal neural dynamics for top-down modulation of category-specific information. Together, these studies provide novel evidence for the anticipatory, adaptive nature, and flexibility of our mind and brain.