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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Cognit.
Sec. Neural Networks and Cognition
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2024.1404909
This article is part of the Research Topic Rising Stars in Cognition: 2023/4 View all articles

Neural evidence of deprioritizing to-be-forgotten information in visual working memory

Provisionally accepted
Katherine C. Moen Katherine C. Moen 1,2*Melissa R. Beck Melissa R. Beck 2Steven G. Greening Steven G. Greening 2,3
  • 1 University of Nebraska at Kearney, Kearney, United States
  • 2 Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States
  • 3 University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Although evidence supports the effective use of a cue to forget an encoded stimulus, the mechanisms of this forgetting are not well understood. Evidence from item-method directed forgetting in long-term memory reveals greater prefrontal and parietal activation for information that is cued to be forgotten. Activation in those brain regions is typically associated with increased effort and cognitive control. To test the mechanism of directed forgetting in visual working memory, we used stimuli that rely on distinct brain regions such as faces and buildings and varied memory stability. Participants completed a directed forgetting task with faces and buildings, and memory stability was manipulated by presenting some stimuli repeatedly throughout the study, and other stimuli were only presented once. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results from the parahippocampal place area suggest that to-be-remembered buildings elicit higher activation than to-be-forgotten buildings. In addition, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation changed throughout the trial period, possibly suggesting that the cue led to information being dropped from visual working memory, or through a shift in attention, as occurs with the retro-cue paradigm. Several explanations for these results are discussed.

    Keywords: visual working memory, directed forgetting, forgetting mechanisms, functional imaging, Passive forgetting, active forgetting

    Received: 21 Mar 2024; Accepted: 12 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Moen, Beck and Greening. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Katherine C. Moen, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Kearney, United States

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