Activation and Information in Working Memory Research

Postle, Bradley R.

doi:10.1002/9781118332634.ch2

Cited by 17 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…According to this evidence, levels of activation of the BOLD signal, at least as assessed via the GLM, may be an insensitive and non-specific measure of memory maintenance (e.g., Lewis-Peacock and Postle, 2012; LeRocque et al, 2013; for review see Postle, in press). While these evolving viewpoints regarding the maintenance of information in working memory are very intriguing, they are unlikely to make the current pattern of results uninterpretable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple modes of clearing one's mind of current thoughts: Overlapping and distinct neural systems

et al. 2015

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This study used the power of neuroimaging to identify the neural systems that remove information from working memory, a thorny issue to examine because it is difficult to confirm that individuals have actually modified their thoughts. To overcome this problem, brain activation as measured via fMRI was assessed when individuals had to clear their mind of all thought (global clear), clear their mind of a particular thought (targeted clear), or replace the current thought (replace), relative to maintaining an item in working memory. The pattern of activity in posterior sensory regions across these conditions confirmed compliance with task demands. A hierarchy of brain regions involved in cognitive control, including parietal, dorsolateral prefrontal and frontopolar regions, were engaged to varying degrees depending on the manner in which information was removed from working memory. In addition, individuals with greater difficulty in controlling internal thoughts exhibited greater activity in prefrontal brain regions associated with cognitive control, as well as in left lateral prefrontal areas including Broca’s area, which is associated with inner speech.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple modes of clearing one's mind of current thoughts: Overlapping and distinct neural systems

et al. 2015

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“…Consistent with findings by the Postle group, they found evidence for content-specific STM representations within sub-regions of occipital and parietal cortex, but not in the PFC (Christophel, Cichy, Hebart, & Haynes, 2015; Christophel & Haynes, 2014; Christophel, Hebart, & Haynes, 2012). Together, these failures to find evidence for content-specific information in PFC suggest that commonly reported increases in sustained activity are primarily related to executive control functions rather than to storing specific features of remembered stimuli (D’Esposito & Postle, 2015; Postle, 2015). …”

Section: Sustained Activity and Executive Control Functions In The Pfcmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Instead, they used multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to examine changes in the pattern of activation across voxels within each sub-region of the PFC. By focusing on changes in the large-scale pattern of responses across many voxels, MVPA is far more sensitive to detect whether a brain region is encoding information about a remembered feature during STM (Postle, 2015; Serences & Saproo, 2012; Sprague & Serences, 2015; Tong & Pratte, 2012). This increase in sensitivity arises because a pattern of activation within a region can systematically track changes in the contents of STM even if the mean amplitude of the responses across all voxels in that region remains perfectly stable.…”

Section: Sustained Activity and Executive Control Functions In The Pfcmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In some cases, this sustained activity seems to support relatively general cognitive functions such as maintaining tonic attention on the relevant behavioral task (Fuster & Alexander, 1971). In other cases, the observation of sustained activation has been more closely associated with encoding information about motor intentions or the specific task-set that guides the behavior of the subject (Curtis & D’Esposito, 2003, 2004; Curtis et al, 2004; S. H. Lee et al, 2013; Postle, 2015; Riggall & Postle, 2012; Sreenivasan et al, 2014). Second, there are now many reports that fail to find content-specific information in PFC using MVPA and fMRI (Christophel et al, 2015; Christophel & Haynes, 2014; Christophel et al, 2012; Emrich et al, 2013; Riggall & Postle, 2012).…”

Section: Sustained Activity and Executive Control Functions In The Pfcmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, if a similar combination of response enhancement and suppression is maintained across a memory delay period, there would be little overall change in the mean response amplitude averaged across all voxels because the response enhancement and response suppression would cancel out. However, if different voxels within a visual area exhibit even a slight bias in their response to different feature values, then using MVPA to examine the spatial pattern of response modulations should reveal systematic changes related to the storage of different features in STM (Postle, 2015; Serences & Saproo, 2012; Tong & Pratte, 2012). …”

Section: The Sensory Recruitment Hypothesis Of Content-specific Stm Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Neural mechanisms of information storage in visual short-term memory

2016

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The capacity to briefly memorize fleeting sensory information supports visual search and behavioral interactions with relevant stimuli in the environment. Traditionally, studies investigating the neural basis of visual short term memory (STM) have focused on the role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) in exerting executive control over what information is stored and how it is adaptively used to guide behavior. However, the neural substrates that support the actual storage of content-specific information in STM are more controversial, with some attributing this function to PFC and others to the specialized areas of early visual cortex that initially encode incoming sensory stimuli. In contrast to these traditional views, I will review evidence suggesting that content-specific information can be flexibly maintained in areas across the cortical hierarchy ranging from early visual cortex to PFC. While the factors that determine exactly where content-specific information is represented are not yet entirely clear, recognizing the importance of task-demands and better understanding the operation of non-spiking neural codes may help to constrain new theories about how memories are maintained at different resolutions, across different timescales, and in the presence of distracting information.

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Characteristics of resting state functional connectivity of motor cortex of high fitness level college students: Experimental evidence from functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)

Zhang

Liu

et al. 2023

Brain and Behavior

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Objective This study inspects difference of resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) of motor cortex between athletes and ordinary college students and the test‐retest reliability of RSFC. Methods Twenty high fitness level college students (high fitness group) and 20 ordinary college students (control group) were recruited. The motor cortical blood oxygen signals in resting states were monitored by functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). RSFCs of brain signals were preprocessed and calculated by FC‐NIRS software. RSFC results of test‐retest reliability were evaluated by intra‐class correlation coefficient (ICC). Results Total RSFC (HbO signal) was significantly different between high fitness group (0.62 ± 0.04) and low fitness group (0.81 ± 0.04) (p < .05). Significant differences were found between the groups (HbO signal) in 50 edges among the 190 edges of motor cortex (14 edges after FDR corrected). At three hemoglobin concentrations, mean of group‐level ICC (C, 1) for total RSFC in two groups was 0.40 ± 0.10, whereas the mean of group‐level ICC (C, k) was 0.57 ± 0.11, depicting “fair” reliability. The mean of group‐level ICC (C, 1) of 190 “edges” was 0.88 ± 0.06, whereas mean of ICC (C, k) was 0.94 ± 0.03, exhibiting “excellent” reliability. Conclusion Fitness level is the factor causing specific changes in RSFC strength of motor cortex that can be utilized as biomarker for evaluating the fitness level.

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Activation and Information in Working Memory Research

Cited by 17 publications

References 79 publications

Multiple modes of clearing one's mind of current thoughts: Overlapping and distinct neural systems

Multiple modes of clearing one's mind of current thoughts: Overlapping and distinct neural systems

Neural mechanisms of information storage in visual short-term memory

Characteristics of resting state functional connectivity of motor cortex of high fitness level college students: Experimental evidence from functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)

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