TY - JOUR T1 - A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/093815 SP - 093815 AU - Darinka Trübutschek AU - Sébastien Marti AU - Andrés Ojeda AU - Jean-Rémi King AU - Yuanyuan Mi AU - Misha Tsodyks AU - Stanislas Dehaene Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/14/093815.abstract N2 - Working memory and conscious perception are thought to share similar brain mechanisms, yet recent reports of non-conscious working memory challenge this view. Combining visual masking with magnetoencephalography, we demonstrate the reality of non-conscious working memory and dissect its neural mechanisms. In a spatial delayed-response task, participants reported the location of a subjectively unseen target above chance-level after a long delay. Conscious perception and conscious working memory were characterized by similar signatures: a sustained desynchronization in the alpha/beta band over frontal cortex, and a decodable representation of target location in posterior sensors. During non-conscious working memory, such activity vanished. Our findings contradict models that identify working memory with sustained neural firing, but are compatible with recent proposals of ‘activity-silent’ working memory. We present a theoretical framework and simulations showing how slowly decaying synaptic changes allow cell assemblies to go dormant during the delay, yet be retrieved above chance-level after several seconds. ER -