Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Working Memory

This chapter takes the perspective that ‘working memory’ refers to a class of behaviours that can be accomplished by the coordinated recruitment of sensory-, representational-, action-, and control-related mechanisms and representations. There is no working memory system, per se. This idea is illustrated with findings from cognitive neuroscience, with an emphasis on studies of human working memory with functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, and on simulations of human behaviour with recurrent neural network modelling. Understanding principles of attention and oculomotor control are central to understanding the selection of stimulus information and its retention ‘in’ working memory, as well as for the moment-to-moment prioritization of subsets of the contents of working memory. Recent research from a dynamical systems perspective suggests a principled framework for understanding how, and under what circumstances, knowledge from long-term memory is recruited to support working memory performance. An important challenge for contemporary cognitive neuroscience is to develop an accepted procedure for assessing when multiple regions can be shown to represent stimulus-specific information, whether these regions are all supporting the same function, or perhaps different functions that nonetheless all entail the active representation of the same information.