2026/03/31 by Baiwei Liu, Zampeta-Sofia Alexopoulou, Siyang Kong +2 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Engineering · #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Spatial Cognition and Navigation #Motor Control and Adaptation
paper · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.0318-25.2026
When holding information ‘in mind’, it is vital to keep individual representations separated and selectively accessible for guiding behaviour. Space is known to serve as a foundational scaffold for mnemonic individuation, yet the format and flexibility of spatial scaffolding for working memory remain elusive. We hypothesised that information in working memory can be re-coded from its native format at encoding to organise and retain internal representations sparsely. To test this, we presented to-be-memorised visual items at distinct directions and distances and leveraged gaze biases during mnemonic selection as an implicit read-out of spatial scaffolding for working memory. We report how male and female humans abstract away over incidental item distance when direction alone suffices as a scaffold, but incorporate distance when it aids mnemonic individuation. This suggests the flexible use of a sparse spatial scaffold for working memory, resorting to the minimal spatial scaffold required for the individuation of internal representations. Significance statement A foundational task faced by the brain is to not only maintain relevant information ‘in mind’ but also to keep maintained representations separate from each other and selectively accessible for guiding behaviour. It has long been known that spatial configurations serve as a foundational scaffold for working-memory organisation, but the nature and flexibility of such spatial scaffolding have remained unclear. By probing biases in fixational gaze behaviour during mnemonic selection, we could uniquely uncover spatial coding for working memory through the eyes – without ever asking about memory for location. Doing so, we uncover the flexible nature of spatial scaffolding for memory: retaining those spatial properties that aid memory organisation while abstracting away over spatial properties that are obsolete.