Rosanne Rademaker

Neural correlates of visual working memory have been found in early visual, parietal, and prefrontal regions. These findings have spurred fruitful debate over how and where in the brain memories might be represented. Here, I will present data from multiple experiments to demonstrate how a focus on behavioral requirements can unveil a more comprehensive understanding of the visual working memory system. Specifically, items in working memory must be maintained in a highly robust manner, resilient to interference. At the same time, storage mechanisms must preserve a high degree of flexibility in case of changing behavioral goals. Several examples will be explored in which visual memory representations are shown to undergo transformations, and even shift their cortical locus alongside their coding format based on specifics of the task.

Rosanne spent her postdoc years at UC San Diego with Prof. John Serences. For the last year of her Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, she was supposed to go to the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, but due to the pandemic never quite made it. She spent her graduate years working at Vanderbilt University with Prof. Frank Tong and at Maastricht University with Prof. Alexander Sack. At present, Rosanne works with 6 amazing graduate students and a postdoc in their Max Planck research group in Frankfurt am Main.