Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we investigated the neural correlates of a visual working memory task. Two experiments were carriedout using scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocorticography (ECoG), respectively. In each trial, participants judgedwhether a test face had been among a small set of recently studied faces. We used a combination of hidden semi-Markov models(HSMMs) and multi-variate pattern analysis (MVPA) to decompose the neural signal into a sequence of latent stages. Analyzedseparately, EEG and ECoG data yielded converging results on the durations of recovered stages. Combining these stages withthe high spatial resolution of ECoG suggested that activity in the temporal cortex reflected item familiarity in the retrievalstage; and that once retrieval is complete, there is active maintenance of the studied face set in the medial temporal lobe (MTL).During this same period, the frontal lobe guides the decision by means of theta coupling with the MTL.