ArticlePLoS computational biology2020
A functional spiking-neuron model of activity-silent working memory in humans based on calcium-mediated short-term synaptic plasticity.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Working Memory Impairment Induced by Chemotherapy-A Narrative Review.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Frequency-Dependent Modulation of Short-Term Neuronal Dynamics in the Female and Male Dorsal and Ventral Rat Hippocampus.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Cannabinoid Modulation of Excitability and Short-Term Neuronal Dynamics in the Dorsal and Ventral Hippocampus.Biology · 2025Article
- Synapses mediate the effects of different types of stress on working memory: a brain-inspired spiking neural network study.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2025Article
- Region-Related Differences in Short-Term Synaptic Plasticity and Synaptotagmin-7 in the Male and Female Hippocampus of a Rat Model of Fragile X Syndrome.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Neuronal activation sequences in lateral prefrontal cortex encode visuospatial working memory during virtual navigation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Maintenance of color memoranda in activity-quiescent working memory states: Evidence from impulse perturbation.iScience · 2024Article
- Concurrent maintenance of both veridical and transformed working memory representations within unique coding schemes.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- A whole-task brain model of associative recognition that accounts for human behavior and neuroimaging data.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- SAM: A Unified Self-Adaptive Multicompartmental Spiking Neuron Model for Learning With Working Memory.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Pinging the brain with visual impulses reveals electrically active, not activity-silent, working memories.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Emergence of Neuronal Synchronisation in Coupled Areas.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2021Article
- Sustained alpha oscillations serve attentional prioritization in working memory, not maintenance.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
- Septotemporal variation in modulation of synaptic transmission, paired-pulse ratio and frequency facilitation/depression by adenosine and GABABrain and neuroscience advancesArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper, we present a functional spiking-neuron model of human working memory (WM). This model combines neural firing for encoding of information with activity-silent maintenance. While it used to be widely assumed that information in WM is maintained through persistent recurrent activity, recent studies have shown that information can be maintained without persistent firing; instead, information can be stored in activity-silent states. A candidate mechanism underlying this type of storage is short-term synaptic plasticity (STSP), by which the strength of connections between neurons rapidly changes to encode new information. To demonstrate that STSP can lead to functional behavior, we integrated STSP by means of calcium-mediated synaptic facilitation in a large-scale spiking-neuron model and added a decision mechanism. The model was used to simulate a recent study that measured behavior and EEG activity of participants in three delayed-response tasks. In these tasks, one or two visual gratings had to be maintained in WM, and compared to subsequent probes. The original study demonstrated that WM contents and its priority status could be decoded from neural activity elicited by a task-irrelevant stimulus displayed during the activity-silent maintenance period. In support of our model, we show that it can perform these tasks, and that both its behavior as well as its neural representations are in agreement with the human data. We conclude that information in WM can be effectively maintained in activity-silent states by means of calcium-mediated STSP.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.