Abstract
SUMMARYNeuronal oscillations are suggested to play an important role in auditory working memory (WM), but their contribution to content-specific representations has remained unclear. Here, we measure magnetoencephalography during a retro-cueing task with parametric ripple-sound stimuli, which are spectrotemporally similar to speech but resist non-auditory memory strategies. Using machine learning analyses, with rigorous between-subject cross-validation and non-parametric permutation testing, we show that memorized sound content is strongly represented in phase-synchronization patterns between subregions of auditory and frontoparietal cortices. These phase-synchronization patterns predict the memorized sound content steadily across the studied maintenance period. In addition to connectivity-based representations, there are indices of more local, “activity silent” representations in auditory cortices, where the decoding accuracy of WM content significantly increases after task-irrelevant “impulse stimuli.” Our results demonstrate that synchronization patterns across auditory sensory and association areas orchestrate neuronal coding of auditory WM content. This connectivity-based coding scheme could also extend beyond the auditory domain.
Highlights
Auditory working memory (WM) refers to our capability to maintain and manipulate sound information in our minds over brief periods of time, which has co-evolved with the auditory-vocal communication skills that set humans apart in the animal kingdom (Aboitiz, 2018)
We show that phase synchronization patterns between subregions of auditory and frontoparietal cortices predict the content of auditory WM with high accuracy
The connections that revealed the WM content during the later stage of maintenance consisted of a subset of those found during the earlier part of maintenance
Summary
Auditory working memory (WM) refers to our capability to maintain and manipulate sound information in our minds over brief periods of time, which has co-evolved with the auditory-vocal communication skills that set humans apart in the animal kingdom (Aboitiz, 2018). Many current theories view WM as an emergent property of functionally interconnected brain areas that represent different sensory, perceptual, and cognitive stages of the task-relevant content (Christophel et al, 2017; Postle, 2006). These distributed models are gaining wide support, relatively few studies have examined information content in interregional patterns of brain activity per se during WM maintenance (Salazar et al, 2012; Soreq et al, 2019)
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