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Abstract

Traditional views of visual working memory postulate that memorized contents are stored in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex using an adaptive and flexible code. In contrast, recent studies proposed that contents are maintained by posterior brain areas using codes akin to perceptual representations. An important question is whether this reflects a difference in the level of abstraction between posterior and prefrontal representations. Here we investigated whether neural representations of visual working memory contents are view-independent, as indicated by rotation-invariance. Using fMRI and multivariate pattern analyses, we show that when subjects memorize complex shapes, both posterior and frontal brain regions maintain the memorized contents using a rotation-invariant code. Importantly, we found the representations in frontal cortex to be localized to the frontal eye fields rather than dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Thus, our results give evidence for the view-independent storage of complex shapes in distributed representations across posterior and frontal brain regions.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Cerebral Cortex following peer review. The version of record Thomas B Christophel, Carsten Allefeld, Christian Endisch, John-Dylan Haynes, View-Independent Working Memory Representations of Artificial Shapes in Prefrontal and Posterior Regions of the Human Brain, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 28, Issue 6, June 2018, Pages 2146–2161, is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhx119
Publisher Keywords:	fMRI, invariance, multivariate pattern analyses, visual short-term memory, working memory
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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