TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mayer, Jutta
A1  - Korinth, Sebastian
A1  - Peters, Benjamin
A1  - Fiebach, Christian
T1  - An electrophysiological dissociation of encoding vs. maintenance failures in visual-spatial working memory
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Working memory (WM) performance varies substantially among individuals but the precise contribution of different WM component processes to these functional limits remains unclear. By analyzing different types of responses in a spatial WM task, we recently demonstrated a functional dissociation between confident and not-confident errors reflecting failures of WM encoding and maintenance, respectively. Here, we use event-related brain potentials to further explore this dissociation. Healthy participants performed a delayed orientation-discrimination task and rated their response confidence for each trial. The encoding-related N2pc component was significantly reduced for confident errors compared to confident correct responses, which is indicative of an encoding failure. In contrast, the maintenance-related contra-lateral delay activity was similar for these response types indicating that in confident error trials, WM representations – potentially the wrong ones – were maintained accurately and with stability throughout the delay interval. However, contra-lateral delay activity measured during the early part of the delay period was decreased for not-confident errors, potentially reflecting compromised maintenance processes. These electrophysiological findings contribute to a refined understanding of the encoding and maintenance processes that contribute to limitations in WM performance and capacity.
KW  - working memory
KW  - encoding
KW  - maintenance
KW  - orientation
KW  - contralateral delay activity
KW  - N2
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53349
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-533495
N1  - Copyright © 2020 Mayer, Korinth, Peters and Fiebach. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 11
IS  - Article 522
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -