RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Independent Activity Subspaces for Working Memory and Motor Preparation in the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 756072
DO 10.1101/756072
A1 Cheng Tang
A1 Roger Herikstad
A1 Aishwarya Parthasarathy
A1 Camilo Libedinsky
A1 Shih-Cheng Yen
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/06/756072.abstract
AB The lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in the integration of multiple types of information, including working memory and motor preparation. However, it is not known how downstream regions can extract one type of information without interference from the others present in the network. Here we show that the lateral prefrontal cortex contains two independent low-dimensional subspaces: one that encodes working memory information, and another that encodes motor preparation information. These subspaces capture all the information about the target in the delay periods, and the information in both subspaces is reduced in error trials. A single population of neurons with mixed selectivity forms both subspaces, but the information is kept largely independent from each other. A bump attractor model with divisive normalization replicates the properties of the neural data. These results have implications for the neural mechanisms of cognitive flexibility and capacity limitations.