RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Does rehearsal benefit visual memory? The role of semantic associations in the maintenance of intact and phase-scrambled scenes
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 753350
DO 10.1101/753350
A1 Chelsea Reichert Plaska
A1 Ashley M. Arango
A1 Kenneth Ng
A1 Timothy M. Ellmore
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/10/753350.abstract
AB Articulatory rehearsal during working memory (WM) maintenance facilitates subsequent retrieval, particularly for verbal material. Less is known about how rehearsal modulates WM delay activity during the maintenance of novel visual information. In the present study, 44 participants completed a Sternberg WM Task with either intact novel scenes (NS) or phase-scrambled versions (SS), which had similar color and spatial frequency but lacked semantic content. During each condition participants generated a descriptive label for each stimulus and covertly rehearsed it (CR) or suppressed it (AS, i.e., repeat “the”) during the delay. This was easy in the former condition but more difficult in the later condition where scenes lacked semantic content. Behavioral performance and EEG delay activity was analyzed as a function of maintenance strategy (CR vs. AS) and stimulus type (NS vs. SS). Performance on the WM task for NS revealed that CR neither improved short- or long-term memory. Delay activity revealed greater amplitude in the beta range in right parietal and centromedial regions for CR compared to AS. When task difficulty increased in the SS condition, there was both a significant short- and long-term behavioral advantage as well as greater activity in the upper alpha and beta ranges throughout the delay period. These results show that rehearsal benefits subsequent memory for visual information, but only when the maintained stimuli lack semantic information. We conclude that task difficulty and cognitive strategy modulate the pattern of delay activity during maintenance of novel visual information with effects on subsequent memory.