Decoding the Contents and Attentional States of Visual Short-Term Memory Representations, and their Effect on Behaviour

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There is much more information present in the environment than humans are able to process at a given moment. Consequently, one of the critical questions facing cognitive neuroscience research is how the human brain is able to facilitate everyday behaviour given these bottlenecks in information processing. The research outlined in this proposal is aimed at understanding how the human brain is able to hold visual information "on-line" for short periods of time. This process, known as visual short-term memory, is severely limited, although the neural mechanisms that limit this ability are unknown. In addition, visual memory interacts with other processes to help produce behaviour. Consequently, some of the studies we will conduct will examine how the neural mechanisms that support visual short-term memory determine what information in the environment is attended, as well as what information is ultimately perceived. These studies will use functional MRI (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to examine real-time brain activity while participants perform tasks that measure their performance on tests of short-term memory, attention, and perception. Together, these studies will help inform how the human brain is able to process visual information, and how the limits of this processing affect and determine our everyday behaviour.