Modelling neural correlates of working memory: A coordinate-based meta-analysis

By Claudia Rottschy, Robert Langner, Imis Dogan, Kathrin Reetz, Angela R. Laird, Jörg B. Schulz, Peter T. Fox, Simon B. Eickhoff. NeuroImage, 2011

894 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Working memory subsumes the capability to memorize, retrieve and utilize information for a limited period of time which is essential to many human behaviours. Moreover, impairments of working memory functions may be found in nearly all neurological and psychiatric diseases. To examine what brain regions are commonly and differently active during various working memory tasks, we performed a coordinate-based meta-analysis over 189 fMRI experiments on healthy subjects. The main effect yielded a widespread bilateral fronto-parietal network. Further meta-analyses revealed that several regions were sensitive to specific task components, e.g. Broca’s region was selectively active during verbal tasks or ventral and dorsal premotor cortex were preferentially involved in memory for object identity and location, respectively. Moreover, the lateral prefrontal cortex showed a division in a rostral and a caudal part based on differential involvement in task-set and load effects. Nevertheless, a consistent but more restricted “core” network emerged from conjunctions across analyses of specific task designs and contrasts. This “core” network appears to comprise the quintessence of regions, which are necessary during working memory tasks. It may be argued that the core regions form a distributed executive network with potentially generalized functions for focusing on competing representations in the brain. The present study demonstrates that meta-analyses are a powerful tool to integrate the data of functional imaging studies on a (broader) psychological construct, probing the consistency across various paradigms as well as the differential effects of different experimental implementations.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/675b0c5150c3c439ad1056e8486cb2604963a9b9

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Citations in the corpus

From brain maps to cognitive ontologies: informatics and the search for mental structure (2015, background): ““Working memory subsumes the capability to memorize, retrieve and utilize information for a limited period of time” (Rottschy et al. 2012).”
Ten simple rules for neuroimaging meta-analysis (2017, background): “However, coordinate-based neuroimaging meta-analyses are conceptually different, testing for spatial convergence of effects across experiments with the nullhypothesis of random spatial convergence (Rottschy et al., 2012).”
Sustaining attention to simple tasks: a meta-analytic review of the neural mechanisms of vigilant attention. (2013, methodology): “Moreover, as detailed elsewhere (Eickhoff & Bzdok, in press; Rottschy et al., 2012), coordinate-based meta-analyses of neuroimaging data are less susceptible to publication bias than standard meta-analytic approaches that examine effect sizes, as the assessment of spatial convergence across experime”
Behavior, Sensitivity, and power of activation likelihood estimation characterized by massive empirical simulation (2016, neutral): “The first pool contained 15 hand-coded datasets (Bzdok et al., 2012; Cieslik et al., 2015; Hardwick et al., 2013; Kohn et al., 2014; Rottschy et al., 2012).”
Statistical localization of human olfactory cortex (2013, methodology): “We conducted these contrasts on the basis of all included studies given that the contrast algorithm implemented in GingerALE 2.2 has been shown to reliably handle contrasts with an unequal sample size of included experiments or uneven number of foci (Eickhoff et al., 2012; Rottschy et al., 2012).”
A quantitative meta-analysis and review of motor learning in the human brain (2013, methodology): “The locations of the left dPMC activation found by Rottschy et al. (2012) and the left dPMC cluster found in the combined conjunction in the present meta-analysis are presented in Fig.”
Neural correlates of action: Comparing meta‐analyses of imagery, observation, and execution (2018, neutral): “DLPFC recruitment during Motor Imagery could be due to working memory demands, thought to be separate to frontal-executive DLPFC functions recruited during more complex movement tasks (Rottschy et al., 2012; Wollenweber et al., 2014).”
Strengthening of alpha synchronization is a neural correlate of cognitive transfer (2024, background): “The activity of these specific brain regions are known to correlate with VSWM (Rottschy et al. 2012).”
Parietal Alpha Oscillatory Peak Frequency Mediates the Effect of Practice on Visuospatial Working Memory Performance (2022, background): “In addition, right-lateralization was often found in WM tasks involving visuospatial (rather than verbal) stimuli [18,20].”
Network‐based rTMS to modulate working memory: The difficult choice of effective parameters for online interventions (2021, methodology): “Given the importance of the fronto-parietal network in supporting WM maintenance and manipulation (Rottschy et al., 2012; Wager & Smith, 2003), rTMS was applied to either the left DLPFC (Beynel, Davis et al., 2019) or the left lateral parietal cortex (LPC, Beynel, Davis et al., 2020) using…”