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. 2021 May 19;41(20):4461–4475. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3104-20.2021

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Copyright © 2021 Muhle-Karbe et al.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.

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Figure 9. — Representational quality of WM items as a function of priority shifts. A, Illustration of a hypothetical trial sequence within a task block and the resulting cue sequences that describe periods within the block, wherein an item was used before and after a priority shift. B, Illustration of cardinal distances of WM items. For each WM item, we calculated the angular distance to the closest cardinal axis (vertical or horizontal). Note that this visualization displays a simplified case with only two different distances, whereas our stimulus set contained a total of eight different cardinal distances. C, Performance was regressed against the trial number within the current block and the cue sequence within the current block to index time-dependent and shift-dependent degradation of WM items, respectively. The plots display sequential Bayes factors of the respective regression weights for log-RT (left) and accuracy (right). Our results revealed robust effects of time-dependent degradation, but no effects for shift-dependent degradation with Bayes factors lending support for the null hypotheses. D, Performance accuracy was also regressed against the angular distance between the cued WM item and the closest cardinal axis (see B), separately for each cue sequence. The left and the middle plot display mean accuracy for the respective conditions, and the right plot displays the regression weights for each cue sequence. As shown on the plots, we observed robust cardinal distance effects, whereby accuracy decreased with larger distances, but these cardinal bias effects did not differ between cue sequences. E–G, We also compared decoding time courses (E), spatiotemporal decoding strength (F), and the strength of performance regression (G) of cued WM items among the first four cue sequences. No significant differences were observed. All of these results converge on the notion that priority shifts did not degrade the quality of WM representations. Please note that results are shown for the pooled data across both experiments.