Professor Felix Blankenburg | Sensori-Motor Working Memory: Mental Representations of Tactile Information and Prospective Actions

https://zoom.us/j/93526030034?pwd=ZkJnYlFVOEthU2lDeE5nVmV6TlZLZz09

Research in macaques has demonstrated that the brain can retain continuous (analog) vibrotactile information over short delays, giving rise to the influential concept of parametric working memory (Romo et al., 1999). Converging evidence in humans has revealed analogous representations, expressed as oscillatory activity in the beta band measured with EEG (Spitzer et al., 2010). Building on these findings, multivariate fMRI approaches have identified parametric encoding of vibrotactile frequency in prefrontal cortex (Schmidt et al., 2017), as well as parietal representations of spatiotactile information (Grundei, 2025). More recently, research has extended this framework to show that similarly distributed brain networks encode increasingly abstract, temporally structured plans for parametric actions (Caccialupi et al., 2025). In this talk, I will review this line of work and discuss its implications in the context of contemporary theories of working memory and action planning.