View article

The Contralateral Delay Activity (CDA) is a popular neural measure used to track storage in visual Working Memory (WM). The amplitude of the CDA increases with the number of memoranda, asymptotes around 3 items, and is sensitive to individual differences in behavior. However, there is still debate about whether the CDA reflects WM contents or sustained spatial attention. WM tasks place high demands on sustained spatial attention, so attention and WM demands have been confounded in previous work. Here, we tested whether the CDA manifests when demands for sustained spatial attention are high, but demands for WM storage are absent. In the WM task, participants performed bilateral change detection for colored squares. In the attention task, participants had to continuously attend to locations that were previously occupied by squares and report the orientation of a rare target line during the blank period …