Neural waves and short-term memory in a neural net model.

Abstract

We show that recognizable neural waveforms are reproduced in the model described in previous work. In so doing, we reproduce close matches to certain observed, though filtered, EEG-like measurements in closed mathematical form, to good approximations. Such neural waves represent the responses of individual networks to external and endogenous inputs and are presumably the carriers of the information used to perform computations in actual brains, which are complexes of interconnected networks. Then, we apply these findings to a question arising in short-term memory processing in humans. Namely, we show how the anomalously small number of reliable retrievals from short-term memory found in certain trials of the Sternberg task is related to the relative frequencies of the neural waves involved. This finding justifies the hypothesis of phase-coding, which has been posited as an explanation of this effect.