Figure 1.

Schematic of the Sternberg task. Participants see a list of 1–4 stimuli (faces or letters), followed by a 3000 ms delay interval. After the delay, a probe stimulus appears and participants have to indicate whether the probe was a member of the just-presented list. The maintenance interval is defined as the period between 0 and 3000 ms after the offset of the last list item. Stimuli were sets of 16 letters and 16 faces, presented in alternating blocks of 15 lists.