Figure 1.

a, Possible attention-based strategy for remembering an orientation. Maintaining attention on one or both of the extreme ends of the grating over a delay interval could help an observer reproduce the orientation or detect changes in orientation at the end of the interval. Even if this was not the sole mechanism being used for the task, it would likely be useful for performing the task, and neural signals related to spatial attention could potentially be sufficient to produce above-chance decoding of the orientation. b, Delayed estimation task used in Experiment 1. On each trial, participants fixated at the central dot for 500 ms (not shown here) and then saw a 200 ms teardrop. After a 1300 ms delay period, a response ring appeared, followed by a test teardrop as soon as the participant began moving the mouse. Participants used the mouse to adjust the orientation of the test teardrop until it matched the remembered orientation of the sample teardrop. The tip of the test teardrop pointed toward the mouse cursor, and participants clicked the mouse button to finalize their report. c, Probability distribution of response errors in Experiment 1, collapsed across all participants.