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. 2021 Aug 5;12:4714. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24973-1

Fig. 1. Attending a distractor stimulus impairs working memory performance.

Fig. 1

A Participants (n = 7) performed a memory-guided saccade task while brain activity and gaze were recorded inside the scanner. Each trial began with a condition cue, reliably indicating whether a distractor would appear on that trial (70% of trials) or not (30%). On each trial, participants maintained the precise spatial position of a briefly presented visual target (12° eccentricity, random polar angle) over an extended 12 s memory delay. At the end of the delay, they executed a memory-guided saccade to the remembered position. The memory target was then re-presented, and participants fixated this location before returning to central fixation. During distractor-present trials, participants discriminated whether dots presented within a 2° diameter aperture were rotating clockwise or counterclockwise with a button press. Across runs, motion coherence was varied to achieve ~75% correct performance (actual mean = 73%). The distracting stimulus could appear within one of seven position bins (24° polar angle wide) around the screen relative to the WM target, evenly presented across trials, denoted by blue intervals relative to an example WM target position (inset). B Timing of task events and example gaze data. Top: trial events (start of delay, distractor, and response) were synchronized to the beginning of 750 ms imaging volumes. For subsequent fMRI analyses, we defined three trial epochs for further analyses (see below, Figs. 57) assuming ~4 s hemodynamic delay (PRE: volumes before distractor, DIST: volumes during distractor, POST: volumes after distractor). Bottom: eye-trace of all trials of each condition for an example participant (p02). Eye position eccentricity is plotted as a function of time; distractor-absent trials are plotted with positive values, and distractor-present trials are plotted with negative values. Note that gaze remains at fixation during distraction keeping the retinal position of the memory target constant. C Aligned final saccadic endpoints (all participants) for trials in which distractors were absent or present. All endpoints are aligned by rotating to a common spatial position (along the horizontal meridian at 12° eccentricity). D Memory error (standard deviation of the polar angle of saccade endpoints) varied with distractor presence (t-test, two-tailed, p = 0.039). Gray lines show individual participants (n = 7); colored circles show group mean (error bars reflect ±SEM). E Response time also varied based on distractor presence (t-test, two-tailed, p = 0.011). Colored circles show group mean (error bars reflect ±SEM); Gray lines show individual participants (n = 7). Analysis of behavioral performance across individual distractor location bins shown in Supplementary Fig. 1.