Visual working memory representations selectively drop in contralateral visual cortex but remain decodable in parietal cortex after eye movements

It has been suggested that our visual system does not only process stimuli that are directly available to our eyes, but also has a role in maintaining information in visual working memory (VWM) over a period of seconds. However, two critical questions remain unresolved. First, are VWM representations spatially specific to the retinotopic location of stimuli in the absence of eye movements? Second, how are VWM representations in the visual system affected by eye movements? In this study, we examined VWM representations in early visual cortex (EVC) and parietal cortex in both no-saccade and saccade conditions using MVPA of delay-related activity measured with fMRI. In the no-saccade condition, remembered information was represented in both the contralateral and ipsilateral hemispheres in almost all regions, supporting the hypothesis of spatially global representations. Interestingly, following an eye movement, VWM representations in the contralateral EVC exhibited a selective reduction, whereas representations in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) remained decodable and showed no significant drop across saccades. These findings suggest that VWM representations in parietal cortex are relatively stable. In contrast, VWM representations in the contralateral EVC are more susceptible to saccadic disruption. However, the stable VWM representations in the ipsilateral EVC highlight the adaptive capacity of EVC, underscoring its role as a flexible neural substrate for VWM representations. This collection contains raw data, preprocessed behavioral and fMRI data, along with the associated analysis scripts to reproduce the results in the paper. The directory structure of the dataset is described in Analysis_README.txt.