Abstract
Working memory (WM) extends the duration over which information is available for processing. Given its importance in supporting a wide-array of high level cognitive abilities, uncovering the neural mechanisms that underlie WM has been a primary goal of neuroscience research over the past century. Here, we critically review what we consider the two major “arcs” of inquiry, with a specific focus on findings that were theoretically transformative. For the first arc, we briefly review classic studies that led to the canonical WM theory that cast the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a central player utilizing persistent activity of neurons as a mechanism for memory storage. We then consider recent challenges to the theory regarding the role of persistent neural activity. The second arc, which evolved over the last decade, stemmed from sophisticated computational neuroimaging approaches enabling researchers to decode the contents of WM from the patterns of neural activity in many parts of the brain including early visual cortex. We summarize key findings from these studies, their implications for WM theory, and finally the challenges these findings pose. Our goal in doing so is to identify barriers to developing a comprehensive theory of WM that will require a unification of these two “arcs” of research.
Highlights
The ability to store information for brief periods of time, so-called working memory (WM), is a building block for most of our higher cognitive functions, and its dysfunction is at the heart of a variety of psychiatric and neurologic symptoms
Measuring neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while humans perform spatial WM tasks, including memory-guided saccade WM tasks like those used to initially study the macaque prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Funahashi et al, 1989), we find that fMRI is perfectly sensitive to WM representations of single items (Curtis et al, 2004; Curtis and D’Esposito, 2006; Schluppeck et al, 2006; Srimal and Curtis, 2008; Tark and Curtis, 2009; Jerde et al, 2012; Sprague et al, 2014; Saber et al, 2015; Rahmati et al, 2020; Hallenbeck et al, in press)
We reported the same pattern in V1 previously even on trials in which the location of the visual target was different from the location of the memory-guided saccade, using an antisaccade procedure (Saber et al, 2015), indicating that the response is memory related and not solely a residual BOLD response due to the visual transient
Summary
Reviewed by: Athanasia Papoutsi Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Greece. We briefly review classic studies that led to the canonical WM theory that cast the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a central player utilizing persistent activity of neurons as a mechanism for memory storage. We consider recent challenges to the theory regarding the role of persistent neural activity. The second arc, which evolved over the last decade, stemmed from sophisticated computational neuroimaging approaches enabling researchers to decode the contents of WM from the patterns of neural activity in many parts of the brain including early visual cortex. Our goal in doing so is to identify barriers to developing a comprehensive theory of WM that will require a unification of these two “arcs” of research
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