Motion Information Is Spatially Localized in a Visual Working-Memory Task

We asked if the information about stimulus motion used in a visual working-memory task is localized in space. Monkeys compared the directions of two moving random-dot stimuli, sample and test, separated by a temporal delay and reported whether the stimuli moved in the same or in different directions. By presenting the two comparison stimuli in separate locations in the visual field, we determined whether information about stimulus direction was spatially localized during the storage and retrieval/comparison components of the task. Two psychophysical measures of direction discrimination provided nearly identical estimates of the critical spatial separation between sample and test stimuli that lead to a loss in threshold. Direction range thresholds measured with dot stimuli consisting of a range of local directional vectors were affected by spatial separation when a random-motion mask was introduced during the delay into the location of the upcoming test. The selective masking at the test location suggests that the information about the remembered direction was localized and available at that location. Direction difference thresholds, measured with coherently moving random dots, were also affected by separation between the two comparison stimuli. The separation at which performance was affected in both tasks increased with retinal eccentricity in parallel with the increase in receptive-field size in neurons in cortical area MT. The loss with transfer of visual information between different spatial locations suggests a contribution of cortical areas with localized receptive fields to the performance of the memory task. The similarity in the spatial scale of the storage mechanism derived psychophysically and the receptive field size of neurons in area MT suggest that MT neurons are central to this task.