Mechanisms of sustained rehearsal in tactile short-term memory

• Applicant: Dr. Tobias Katus
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237675329

The tactile system encodes stimuli that impinge on the body surface. Therefore, locations of tactile stimuli are initially represented in anatomical space. The limbs of the body, however, are located in extrapersonal space. The human brain takes into account body posture to map anatomical coordinates of tactile stimuli to extrapersonal space. Extrapersonal spatial codes are of major importance to neural mechanisms of tactile spatial attention, as reported by perceptual attention studies that manipulated body posture. However, these studies also suggest that the tactile system provides specialized functions that operate on anatomical codes for locations. Spatial short-term memory (STM) has been typically examined in vision, a modality that lacks a representation of anatomical space. However, it is unclear whether spatial STM in touch is governed by the same principles as in vision. This research proposal aims to evaluate the hypothesis that tactile STM stores locations within a multi-dimensional coordinate system that integrates representations of anatomical and extrapersonal space. In a series of 5 EEG experiments, we intend to examine the interplay of the dual codes for locations with functions of selective attention that filter STM representations in a spatially specific manner. It is hypothesized that anatomical and extrapersonal codes are preserved during the retention delay of tactile STM tasks and can be selectively accessed to bias relevant mnemonic information. However, extrapersonal space may be the dominant representational format for locations in tactile STM. The proposed project will furthermore investigate how attributes that belong to different dimensions of space are organized into higher-order representations of objects.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Dr. Martin Eimer