ArticleNeuron2021
Joint representation of working memory and uncertainty in human cortex.
Article in Neuron, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Hippocampal mechanisms underlying the resolution of competition in memory and perception.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Visual field map size constrains working memory precision.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
- Retinotopic Spatial Working Memory Representations Are Not Affected by Task-irrelevant Visual Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Visual confidence accurately tracks increasing internal noise with eccentricity in peripheral vision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 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
- Factorized embedding of goal and uncertainty in the lateral prefrontal cortex guides stably flexible learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Probabilistic working memory representations in human cortex guide behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Spontaneous activity of astrocytes is a stochastic functional signal for memory consolidation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Learning and inference with correlated neural variability.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Confidence and Insight into Working Memory Are Shaped by Attention and Recent Performance.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Humans use underestimates of auditory spatial and temporal uncertainty for perceptual inference.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The tilt illusion arises from an efficient reallocation of neural coding resources at the contextual boundary.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of resource allocation in working memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- Prioritizing Working Memory Resources Depends on the Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Time Course of Orientation Ensemble Representation in the Human Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- The Inferior Frontal Junction Jointly Encodes Target Identity and Feature Uncertainty.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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Neural representations of visual working memory (VWM) are noisy, and thus, decisions based on VWM are inevitably subject to uncertainty. However, the mechanisms by which the brain simultaneously represents the content and uncertainty of memory remain largely unknown. Here, inspired by the theory of probabilistic population codes, we test the hypothesis that the human brain represents an item maintained in VWM as a probability distribution over stimulus feature space, thereby capturing both its content and uncertainty. We used a neural generative model to decode probability distributions over memorized locations from fMRI activation patterns. We found that the mean of the probability distribution decoded from retinotopic cortical areas predicted memory reports on a trial-by-trial basis. Moreover, in several of the same mid-dorsal stream areas, the spread of the distribution predicted subjective trial-by-trial uncertainty judgments. These results provide evidence that VWM content and uncertainty are jointly represented by probabilistic neural codes.
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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.