Fig. 1: Experimental procedure, electrode coverage, and behavioral results.

A Participants encoded a sequence of 3 images of natural objects and were asked to remember this content during two subsequent maintenance periods that were separated by a retro-cue (M1 – retro-cue – M2). The cue prompted participants to either selectively maintain items at particular list positions (single-item trials, “1, 2, 3” in the figure) or to maintain all items in their order of presentation (multi-item trials, “All” in the figure). During the probe, six items were presented, which included all encoded items and three exemplars from previously presented or novel categories (Methods). The figure displays representative images very similar to those shown during the experiment, in compliance with a CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). B Electrode implantation included 438 electrodes in the ventral visual stream (VVS, N = 28 participants; top) and 146 electrodes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC, N = 16 participants; bottom). Cortical areas included in each region are highlighted in pink. C Behavioral performance was significantly higher for single as compared to multi-item trials in our patient group (paired t-test, two-sided, n = 32). D Left: Representational patterns in the RSA analyses included neural activity across electrodes, time points (5 time points in each 500 ms window), and frequencies. Spearman correlations were computed in windows of 500 ms, incrementing in 100 ms steps (middle). Analyses were performed in individual frequencies in the 3-150 Hz range in the model-based RSA analyses, and within different frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta, low-gamma, high-gamma) in the contrast-based analyses. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Image sources (A): Tree 1: https://www.istockphoto.com/en/portfolio/YutthasartYanakornsiri; Tree 2: https://www.istockphoto.com/en/portfolio/Coldimages; Robot 1 and 2: https://www.istockphoto.com/en/portfolio/Ociacia; Hand: https://www.istockphoto.com/en/portfolio/Hanis; Planet: https://www.istockphoto.com/en/portfolio/GeorgeManga. **p < 0.01.