ReviewFrontiers in neural circuits2021
Persistent Activity During Working Memory From Front to Back.
Review in Frontiers in neural circuits, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
- Amygdalostriatal transition zone neurons encode sustained cue responses to guide defensive behaviors.Neuron · 2026Article
- A scalable touchscreen-based spatial working memory task for cross-species research.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2026Article
- Neural synchrony between prefrontal and visual cortex supports visual working memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cerebellar perturbation impairs human working memory and degrades spatial tuning throughout cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Prefrontal Mechanisms of Rule Learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Retinotopic Spatial Working Memory Representations Are Not Affected by Task-irrelevant Visual Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- A Scalable Touchscreen-Based Spatial Working Memory Task for Cross-Species Research.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Frontotemporal bursting supports human working memory.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Dynamics of working memory drift and information flow across the cortical hierarchy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Memory in Psychiatric Disorders: A Review.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Article
- Functional role of cell classes in monkey prefrontal cortex after learning a working memory task.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of resource allocation in working memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- Perturbing human V1 degrades the fidelity of visual working memory.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prioritizing Working Memory Resources Depends on the Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Feedback scales the spatial tuning of cortical responses during both visual working memory and long-term memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Prioritizing working memory resources depends on prefrontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Dynamic layer-specific processing in the prefrontal cortex during working memory.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Timescales of learning in prefrontal cortex.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Trying Harder: How Cognitive Effort Sculpts Neural Representations during Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Working memory (WM) extends the duration over which information is available for processing. Given its importance in supporting a wide-array of high level cognitive abilities, uncovering the neural mechanisms that underlie WM has been a primary goal of neuroscience research over the past century. Here, we critically review what we consider the two major "arcs" of inquiry, with a specific focus on findings that were theoretically transformative. For the first arc, we briefly review classic studies that led to the canonical WM theory that cast the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a central player utilizing persistent activity of neurons as a mechanism for memory storage. We then consider recent challenges to the theory regarding the role of persistent neural activity. The second arc, which evolved over the last decade, stemmed from sophisticated computational neuroimaging approaches enabling researchers to decode the contents of WM from the patterns of neural activity in many parts of the brain including early visual cortex. We summarize key findings from these studies, their implications for WM theory, and finally the challenges these findings pose. Our goal in doing so is to identify barriers to developing a comprehensive theory of WM that will require a unification of these two "arcs" of research.
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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.