ArticleVisual cognition2020
Theoretical distinction between functional states in working memory and their corresponding neural states.
Article in Visual cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of sleep quality on the offline storage state of visual working memory.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Novel Verbal Instructions Recruit Abstract Neural Patterns of Time-Variable Information Dimensionality.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- 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
- Bend but don't break: Prioritization protects working memory from displacement but leaves it vulnerable to distortion from distraction.Cognition · 2023Article
- Differences of resource allocation to active and passive states in visual working memory.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Spatial Configuration Effects on the Dissociation between Active and Latent States in Visual Working Memory.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Are irrelevant items actively deleted from visual working memory?: No evidence from repulsion and attraction effects in dual-retrocue tasks.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- To be or not to be relevant: Comparing short- and long-term consequences across working memory prioritization procedures.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Prioritization sharpens working memories but does not protect them from distraction.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Interhemispheric Connectivity Supports Load-Dependent Working Memory Maintenance for Complex Visual Stimuli.Brain connectivity · 2022Article
- Priority-based transformations of stimulus representation in visual working memory.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A direct comparison of attentional orienting to spatial and temporal positions in visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- The facilitating effect of identical objects in visual working memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Humans, fish, spiders and bees inherited working memory and attention from their last common ancestor.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Pinging the brain with visual impulses reveals electrically active, not activity-silent, working memories.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- A Hierarchy of Functional States in Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Working memory (WM) is important for guiding behaviour, but not always for the next possible action. Here we define a WM item that is currently relevant for guiding behaviour as the functionally "active" item; whereas items maintained in WM, but not immediately relevant to behaviour, are defined as functionally "latent". Traditional neurophysiological theories of WM proposed that content is maintained via persistent neural activity (e.g., stable attractors); however, more recent theories have highlighted the potential role for "activity-silent" mechanisms (e.g., short-term synaptic plasticity). Given these somewhat parallel dichotomies, functionally active and latent cognitive states of WM have been associated with storage based on persistent-activity and activity-silent neural mechanisms, respectively. However, in this article we caution against a one-to-one correspondence between functional and activity states. We argue that the principal theoretical requirement for active and latent WM is that the corresponding neural states play qualitatively different functional roles. We consider a number of candidate solutions, and conclude that the neurophysiological mechanisms for functionally active and latent WM items are theoretically independent of the distinction between persistent activity-based and activity-silent forms of WM storage.
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