Memory mechanisms associated with serial dependency in visuomotor integration

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Esaú Ventura Pupo Sirius¹ (esau.sirius@gmail.com), Veronica Casagrande¹, Raymundo Machado de Azevedo Neto², André Mascioli Cravo¹; ¹Center for Mathematics Computing and Cognition, UFABC, São Bernardo/SP., ²Brain Institute, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein (InCe), São Paulo/SP

In several tasks, events in the current trial are biased toward events from previous trials, an effect named Serial Dependence (SD). Memory traces responsible for SD might be activity-silent, however, recent studies proposed that such patterns can be revealed in electroencephalogram (EEG) using high-energy stimuli (henceforth ping) to uncover information stored in synaptic weights. It remains unclear which features the ping should have and whether this applies to tasks not explicitly engaging memory. We had participants perform a coincident timing task with concomitant EEG recordings. Participants responded to a target hitting a barrier after moving at a constant speed. The intertrial time included a dynamic kinetogram-like stimuli, a white flash, or nothing as a ping. The difference between interception and response times was fed into multiple linear regressions with current and previous trial times as predictors. The previous trial coefficient is a measure of SD, and was significant in all conditions. There was no difference in SD between conditions. We aim to decode previous trial times from the intertrial EEG data to study ping characteristics, expecting that the dynamic condition will provide better decoding than the flash. This will be done by training a classifier in the activity evoked by the ping and testing if it can classify the time to contact in the previous trial. We will perform exploratory analysis looking for patterns in the current trial that may give information about the previously seen trial, and for correlations between decoding strength and SD.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision