AbstractWhen retaining a sequence of auditory tones in working memory (WM), two forms of information – frequency (content) and ordinal position (structure) – have to be maintained in the brain. Here, we employed a time-resolved multivariate decoding analysis on content and structure information separately to examine their neural representations in human auditory WM. We demonstrate that content and structure are stored in a dissociated manner and show distinct characteristics. First, each tone is associated with two separate codes in parallel, characterizing its frequency and ordinal position, respectively. Second, during retention, a structural retrocue reactivates structure but not content, whereas a following white noise triggers content but not structure. Third, structure representation remains unchanged whereas content undergoes a transformation throughout memory progress. Finally, content reactivations during retention correlate with WM behavior. Overall, our results support a factorized content-structure representation in auditory WM, which might help efficient memory formation and storage by generalizing stable structure to new auditory inputs.
Distinct neural representations of content and ordinal structure in auditory sequence memory