Visual working memory representations in visual and parietal cortex do not remap after eye movements

Previous studies have suggested that stimulus representations in the visual system are remapped across eye movements during perception. Interestingly, our visual system does not only process stimuli that are directly available to our eyes, but may also have a role in maintaining information in VWM over a period of seconds. It remains unclear if saccadic remapping also occurs for stimuli that are held in working memory and whether eye movements degrade VWM representations in visual cortex. Here, we directly compared the content of VWM in early visual areas for saccade and no-saccade conditions using MVPA of delay-related activity measured with fMRI. Specifically, we probed item-related VWM representations of the remembered grating orientation from contralateral and ipsilateral early visual areas (V1 - V3) and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). When participants did not make a saccade, VWM representations were robustly present in contralateral early visual cortex. Surprisingly, VWM representations disappeared from contralateral V1-V3 after the saccade shifted the location of the remembered grating to the opposite visual field. In contrast to our saccadic remapping hypothesis, we found no evidence for the representations of the remembered grating at the saccadic target location in the opposite visual field, suggesting that there is no evidence for remapping of VWM in early visual cortex. Interestingly, IPS showed persistent VWM representations in both the saccade and no-saccade condition. Together, our results indicate that VWM representations in early visual cortex are not remapped across eye movements, potentially limiting the role of early visual cortex in VWM storage.