Neural correlate of filtering of irrelevant information from visual working memory

Abstract

In a dynamic environment stimulus task relevancy could be altered through time and it is not always possible to dissociate relevant and irrelevant objects from the very first moment they come to our sight. In such conditions, subjects need to retain maximum possible information in their WM until it is clear which items should be eliminated from WM to free attention and memory resources. Here, we examined the neural basis of irrelevant information filtering from WM by recording human ERP during a visual change detection task in which the stimulus irrelevancy was revealed in a later stage of the task forcing the subjects to keep all of the information in WM until test object set was presented. Assessing subjects' behaviour we found that subjects' RT was highly correlated with the number of irrelevant objects and not the relevant one, pointing to the notion that filtering, and not selection, process was used to handle the distracting effect of irrelevant objects. In addition we found that frontal N150 and parietal N200 peak latencies increased systematically as the amount of irrelevancy load increased. Interestingly, the peak latency of parietal N200, and not frontal N150, better correlated with subjects' RT. The difference between frontal N150 and parietal N200 peak latencies varied with the amount of irrelevancy load suggesting that functional connectivity between modules underlying fronto-parietal potentials vary concomitant with the irrelevancy load. These findings suggest the existence of two neural modules, responsible for irrelevant objects elimination, whose activity latency and functional connectivity depend on the number of irrelevant object. © 2008 Nasr et al.