We then leveraged the neural signature of WM laterality to examine what happened when the remembered location was shifted by a saccade to the opposite visual hemifield relative to the center of gaze. We propose two alternative hypotheses. On the one hand, a WM trace might be bound to the initial representation induced by visual inputs and might simply remain in the hemisphere where it was originally encoded (Figure 3A). This stable trace model predicts no change in neural signatures after the mid-delay saccade (Figure 3B). Alternatively, when the hemifield switches, the neural trace itself might also move from the hemisphere it was originally encoded in to the opposite hemisphere, now contralateral to the remembered location (Figure 3C). This shifting trace model predicts neural signatures of laterality in the swap trials will invert after the midline-crossing saccade (Figure 3D).
