Preparing memories for action: how visual working memories are sculpted by their anticipated use

Objective

Visual working memory allows us to hold in the fore of our mind those visual representations that are anticipated to become most relevant for ensuing behaviour – guiding our perception as well as action. Thus, while working memories inherently regard the past, their purpose is to guide adaptive behaviour in the near future. Yet, conventional studies of visual working memory consider memory retention (how we remember) regardless of anticipated memory use (what we remember for), and neglect that representations that are held in memory concurrently often serve distinct purposes and afford specific actions.

I posit that the accessibility and neural recruitment of individual working memories are fundamentally determined, and dynamically sculpted, by their anticipated use – i.e. by our expectations of when we need individual memory items, and what we need them for. This opens the fundamental, yet largely overlooked, question of how visual working memories are ‘prepared for action’.

To target this central question, this project will pioneer multiple innovative memory tasks and combine these with cutting-edge brain imaging approaches to dynamically track how working memories are optimised to be ready for the right action (theme 1), ready at the right time (theme 2), and ready for the right task (theme 3). Having made considerable progress, this project will then also asses the identified ‘forward thinking' memory dynamics as a key novel dimension to charter relevant individual and group differences in working memory (theme 4).

Together, this is anticipated to uncover ground-breaking novel insights into the pro-active mechanisms that ensure adaptive memory-guided behaviour – and to change not only the way we view visual working memory, but also how we study and use this core cognitive construct.