RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Distinct role of flexible and stable encoding in sequential working memory
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 525220
DO 10.1101/525220
A1 Hyeonsu Lee
A1 Woochul Choi
A1 Youngjin Park
A1 Se-Bum Paik
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/20/525220.abstract
AB The serial-position effect in working memory is considered important for studying how a sequence of sensory information can be retained and manipulated simultaneously in neural memory circuits. Here, via a precise analysis of the primacy and recency effects in human psychophysical experiments, we propose that stable and flexible coding take distinct roles of retaining and updating information in working memory, and that their combination induces serial-position effects spontaneously. We found that stable encoding retains memory to induce the primacy effect, while flexible encoding used for learning new inputs induces the recency effect. A model simulation based on human data, confirmed that a neural network with both flexible and stable synapses could reproduce the major characteristics of serial-position effects. Our new prediction, that the control of resource allocation by flexible-stable coding balance can modulate memory performance in sequence-specific manner, was supported by pre-cued memory performance data in humans.