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Visuospatial working memory is cortically enabled through veridical, categorical and semantic representations

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Joana Pereira Seabra^1,2 (), Andreea-Maria Gui^1,2, Vivien Chopurian^1,2, Alessandra S Souza³, Carsten Allefeld⁴, Thomas B Christophel^1,2; ¹Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, ²Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin and Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, ³University of Porto, ⁴University of London, London

Visual stimuli are frequently prone to categorical biases that impact their recall during working memory. How do these systematic errors originate in the brain? Previous work suggests that a single visual stimulus can elicit multiple representations throughout the cortex, and that these differ in content and format. The cortex might then harbour both continuous and categorical neural representations, with the latter likely presenting a neural correlate of the categorical biases evident in behavior. We collected fMRI data from 40 participants during an orientation working memory task. We assessed the nature of orientation representations using multivariate encoding modelling. Additionally, we cross-decoded between orientation and congruent verbal and location stimuli. Our results show that orientation representations across the cortex are organized along a gradient of abstraction, with more veridical representations in sensory areas, and more abstract, categorical codes in anterior areas. The cross-decoding analyses suggest the presence of a common neural code between orientations and simpler visuospatial stimuli (i.e., locations), as well as between orientations and semantic stimuli. Thus, these results suggest that neural representations include categorical, semantic, and spatial formats, simultaneously held throughout the cortex to maintain visual stimuli in a robust fashion. Our findings support a distributed account of working memory storage featuring multiple representational formats. These range from continuous to categorical, including visuospatial simplifications and semantic depictions of the original stimulus.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory