Probing the limits of activity-silent non-conscious working memory

Abstract

Two types of working memory (WM) have recently been proposed: (i) active WM, relying on sustained neural firing, and (ii) activity-silent WM, for which firing returns to baseline, yet memories may be retained by short-term synaptic changes. Activity-silent WM in particular might also underlie the recently discovered phenomenon of non-conscious WM, which permits even subliminal stimuli to be stored for several seconds. However, whether both states support identical forms of information processing is unknown. Theory predicts that activity-silent states are confined to passive storage and cannot operate on stored information. To determine whether an explicit reactivation is required before the manipulation of information in WM, we evaluated whether participants could mentally rotate brief visual stimuli of variable subjective visibility. Behaviorally, even for unseen targets, subjects reported the rotated location above chance after several seconds. As predicted, however, at the time of mental rotation, such blindsight performance was accompanied by (i) neural signatures of consciousness in the form of a sustained desynchronization in alpha/beta frequency and (ii) a reactivation of the memorized information as indicated by decodable representations of participants’ guess and response. Our findings challenge the concept of genuine non-conscious “working” memory, argue that activity-silent states merely support passive short-term memory, and provide a cautionary note for purely behavioral studies of non-conscious information processing.