About this Research Topic
Visual working memory (VWM) allows us to actively maintain limited amount of visual information so that we can act upon them. Thanks to this ability, we are capable of performing complex activities such as sports, cooking, and driving a vehicle. Studies on visual working memory so far have mainly focused on its basic properties such as its capacity, resource allocation, and the unit of VWM representations. By combining rigorous experimental designs and various techniques including behavioral experiments, brain imaging, and single unit recording, a great progress has been made. However, how VWM representations are controlled to carry out complex behaviors has been less explored to this date. In fact, its control mechanism, or executive control, has largely been independently studied in the realm of cognitive psychology.
Recently, issues on control mechanisms of VWM have received considerable attention from researchers, and they shed new lights on the research on working memory by integrating the research questions in executive control and research techniques of VWM representations. Therefore, this Research Topic seeks to bring together articles on dynamic control of representations in visual working memory at various levels: from basic experimental research using established experimental paradigms to exploratory research on dynamic control in VWM using novel and complex tasks.
Here, dynamic control is broadly defined. It includes interaction of VWM and attention, feature binding in VWM, VWM of objects with dynamic change, VWM and tracking, mental manipulation of VWM representations, automatic aspects of VWM, and many others. This Research Topic will cover studies on behavioral characteristics with relatively complex tasks, on large-scale brain network mechanisms underlying control with EEG, MEG, and fMRI, on micro-circuit level analyses of control mechanisms with single unit recording, on neuromodulation in dynamic control of VWM with neuropharmacological techniques, and their combinations. We primarily call for Original Research and Review (or Minireview) articles, but other types of articles such as Perspectives and Opinion may also be considered.
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
