RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Learning and transfer of working memory gating policies
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 144543
DO 10.1101/144543
A1 Apoorva Bhandari
A1 David Badre
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/31/144543.abstract
AB A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the knowledge structures and neural representations that support flexible behavior and rapid generalization in novel environments. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on abstract rules that leverage shared structure in stimulus-response-outcome (S-R-O) mappings between tasks as the basis of such task knowledge. Here we provide evidence that working memory (WM) gating policies, required for internal control of WM during a task, leverage a form of task structure separate from S-R-O relationships and are re-used in novel situations. In two experiments, we report specific evidence for the transfer of selective WM gating policies across changes in task context. We show that this transfer is not tied to S-R-O rules, suggesting that gating policies may be a separate component of task knowledge. Collectively, our results highlight the importance of WM gating policies as a key component of the task knowledge that supports flexible behavior and task generalization.