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Spontaneous eye-blinks align with the updating of visual working memory

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Daniel Schneider¹ (schneiderd@ifado.de), Sahcan Özdemir¹, Stefan Arnau¹, Edmund Wascher¹; ¹Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany

Visual working memory (WM) maintains task-relevant sensory information but dynamically interacts with action planning. In a delayed match-to-sample task, participants encoded the orientations of two bars from lateralized positions. The upcoming motor response could be predicted only for one of the two orientations, which was also signaled by a contralateral suppression of mu and beta (~10-30 Hz) oscillatory power at centro-parietal electrodes prior to memory probe presentation. In contrast, a robust contralateral delay activity (CDA) emerged when a retro-cue indicated the orientation for which no motor code could be created in advance. This is consistent with the reliance on visuo-spatial WM content in the absence of prospective motor codes. On this basis, we further investigated whether spontaneous eye-blinks, which occur naturally during task performance, are temporally related to these internal updating processes. Eye-blinks occurring after the cue and prior to the first memory probe were used as time-locking events. Remarkably, CDA-like lateralized activity reappeared as a phasic posterior asymmetry shortly after the blink. The effect was comparable in strength to that observed in the stimulus-locked analyses. This pattern suggests that spontaneous blinks are more likely to occur at moments of representational updating or refocusing within WM, rather than being purely random physiological events. Because blinks are easy to detect and occur continuously, they might provide a promising behavioral marker for tracking WM processes, especially in more naturalistic experimental contexts without repetitive trial structures.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory