ArticleeLife2025
Stimulus representation in human frontal cortex supports flexible control in working memory.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial reorganization of object representations in high-level visual cortex distinguishes working memory from perception.Science advances · 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
- Differential Effects of Visual and Auditory Cognitive Tasks on Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Stimulus representation in human frontal cortex supports flexible control in working memory.eLife · 2025Article
- When working memory works for our goals.eLife · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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Registered trials
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