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Feedback to early visual cortex is required for conscious visual experience during working memory maintenance

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Tingting Wu^1,2, Qing Yu^1,*; ¹Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, ²University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

The role of the early visual cortex (EVC) in visual working memory (VWM) maintenance has remained controversial. While human fMRI studies consistently report sustained maintenance of stimulus-specific representations in the EVC during VWM, electrophysiological recordings in non-human primates have largely failed to find such evidence. Here we investigated a previously understudied aspect of VWM, conscious visual experience during maintenance, that may explain EVC functions in human VWM. We studied individuals with aphantasia, who subjectively report an inability to generate and sustain visual mental images despite being able to perform VWM tasks. Using fMRI, we compared perception-, imagery-, and illusion-based VWM between typical imagers and aphantasics while they viewed or imagined a moving Gabor patch in the right visual periphery and maintained it across a delay. Time-resolved decoding of motion paths across the visual hierarchy revealed impaired imagery generation signals in contralateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS) of aphantasics. Furthermore, aphantasics exhibited normal feedforward activity during the sample period, but reduced representations of motion paths across all three conditions during the delay in contralateral EVC. These representational impairments were accompanied by reduced delay-period functional connectivity between contralateral IPS and EVC. In contrast, ipsilateral IPS maintained intact, non-visual representations that potentially supported successful memory performance in aphantasics. These results suggest that normal, delay-period stimulus representations in the EVC depend on top-down feedback from higher-order regions such as the IPS. Such feedback to the EVC is critical for the conscious visual experience of visual content during VWM maintenance.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory