Functional connectivity supporting the selective maintenance of feature-location binding in visual working memory

Information on an object's features bound to its location is very important for maintaining object representations in visual working memory. Interactions with dynamic multi-dimensional objects in an external environment require complex cognitive control, including the selective maintenance of feature-location binding. Here, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activity and functional connectivity related to the maintenance of complex feature-location binding. Participants were required to detect task-relevant changes in feature-location binding between objects defined by color, orientation, and location. We compared a complex binding task requiring complex feature-location binding (color-orientation-location) with a simple binding task in which simple feature-location binding, such as color-location, was task-relevant and the other feature was task-irrelevant. Univariate analyses showed that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), hippocampus, and frontoparietal network were activated during the maintenance of complex feature-location binding. Functional connectivity analyses indicated cooperation between the inferior precentral sulcus (infPreCS), DLPFC, and hippocampus during the maintenance of complex feature-location binding. In contrast, the connectivity for the spatial updating of simple feature-location binding determined by reanalyzing the data from Takahama et al. (2010) demonstrated that the superior parietal lobule (SPL) cooperated with the DLPFC and hippocampus. These results suggest that the connectivity for complex feature-location binding does not simply reflect general memory load and that the DLPFC and hippocampus flexibly modulate the dorsal frontoparietal network, depending on the task requirements, with the infPreCS involved in the maintenance of complex feature-location binding and the SPL involved in the spatial updating of simple feature-location binding.