THE EFFECT OF NATURALISTIC SCENE PRESENTATION ON WORKING MEMORY REPRESENTATIONS

Do background landmarks enhance or reduce active working memory maintenance of target locations? To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) activity while participants completed two delayed spatial estimation tasks which involved alternating background conditions. We found that background cues allowed participants to better remember target locations. We also demonstrated that while simplistic useful cues result in stronger working memory representations than unhelpful cues, real-world images show lower decoding ability than we see when no image is present. Our results demonstrate that useful landmarks at remembered locations enhance sustained spatial memory representations for target locations and that visually complex real-world images can alter a model’s to decode working memory locations.