Nonvisual codes and nonvisual brain areas support visual working memory

Systems models hold working memory to depend on specialized, domain-specific storage buffers. Here, however, we demonstrate that short-term retention of the identity or location of visually presented stimuli is disrupted by nonvisual secondary tasks performed in the dark - passive listening to nouns or endogenous generation of saccades, respectively. This indicates that the short-term retention of visual information relies on multiple mental codes, some of them nonvisual. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals the neural correlates of these interference effects to be more complex and more regionally specific than previously described. Although nonspecific dual-task effects produce a generalized decrease of task-evoked fMRI response across many brain regions, the interference-specific effect is a relative increase of activity localized to regions associated with the secondary task in question: left hemisphere perisylvian cortex in the case of passive listening distraction and frontal oculomotor regions in the case of saccadic distraction. Within these regions, the neural interference effects are specific to voxels that show delay-period activity on unfilled memory trials. They also predict individual differences in the magnitude of the behavioral interference effect. These results indicate that nonvisual processes supported by nonvisual brain areas contribute importantly to visual working memory performance.