John Serences, Ph.D. 
Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego

Traversing everyday sensory environments requires representing relevant features or objects in memory while simultaneously processing new inputs. While working memory involves persistent feature-selective recruitment of early visual cortex, recent work suggests that new sensory inputs during maintenance severely disrupt such recruitment. Here we show region-wide multiplexing abilities in classic ‘sensory’ areas, with population-level response patterns in visual cortex concurrently representing short-term memory contents alongside features of new sensory inputs.