@zoeduan.bsky.social @hannah-chu.bsky.social @zhenganglu.bsky.social

This changes the question of whether V1 is "necessary" for WM to how does V1 retain information during WM
without getting disrupted by a continuous barrage of visual inputs and maintain it within network of neurons having short time-constants?

Additionally, TMS to V1 also impacted alpha-lateralization for about 100ms after TMS pulse, thereby disrupting a well-established signature of WM.

We found that TMS to V1 impacted WM performance not just during encoding as has been shown earlier in many studies, but also during maintenance. We also replicated the results in a followup-study.

Here, using fMRI-guided TMS coupled with a unique design using subjective reports of phosphenes to present spatial stimuli, we perturbed V1 in a retinotopic manner while participants retained a spatial location in their memory.

Despite more than 3 dozen fMRI studies showing decoding of WM representations from early visual areas, the necessity of these areas for task performance has remained uncertain.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...

Thanks for amazing supervision from Clayton Curtis and all the cool people from Clayspace lab and help from everyone at NYU CBI without whom this work would not have been successful. PS: it took over a year to get the TMS-EEG setup working!