RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A neural model of working memory
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 233007
DO 10.1101/233007
A1 Sanjay G Manohar
A1 Nahid Zokaei
A1 Sean J Fallon
A1 Tim Vogels
A1 Masud Husain
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/15/233007.abstract
AB Working memory, the ability to keep recently encountered information available for immediate processing, has been proposed to rely on two mechanisms that appear difficult to reconcile: selfsustained neural firing, or the opposite—activity-silent synaptic traces. Here we show that both phenomena can co-exist within a unified system in which neurons hold information in both activity and synapses. Rapid plasticity in flexibly-coding neurons allows features to be bound together into objects, with an important emergent property being the focus of attention. One memory item is held by persistent activity in an attended or “focused” state, and is thus remembered better than other items. Other, previously attended items can remain in memory but in the background, encoded in activity-silent synaptic traces. This dual functional architecture provides a unified common mechanism accounting for a diverse range of perplexing attention and memory effects that have been hitherto difficult to explain in a single theoretical framework.