Neural substrates of cognitive capacity limitations
By Timothy J. Buschman, Markus Siegel, Jefferson E. Roy, Earl K. Miller. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
304 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cognition has a severely limited capacity: Adult humans can retain only about four items “in mind”. This limitation is fundamental to human brain function: Individual capacity is highly correlated with intelligence measures and capacity is reduced in neuropsychiatric diseases. Although human capacity limitations are well studied, their mechanisms have not been investigated at the single-neuron level. Simultaneous recordings from monkey parietal and frontal cortex revealed that visual capacity limitations occurred immediately upon stimulus encoding and in a bottom-up manner. Capacity limitations were found to reflect a dual model of working memory. The left and right halves of visual space had independent capacities and thus are discrete resources. However, within each hemifield, neural information about successfully remembered objects was reduced by adding further objects, indicating that resources are shared. Together, these results suggest visual capacity limitation is due to discrete, slot-like, resources, each containing limited pools of neural information that can be divided among objects.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81bf91d406b7a792e4fcc246749fafa86ead6913
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Citations in the corpus
- Gamma and beta bursts underlie working memory (2016, unknown): “As a result, (bias-corrected) PEV allowed for the quantification of information carried by the modulation of firing rates of individual units accounting for the location or combination of color and position of the presented stimulus object.”
- Dynamic Coding for Cognitive Control in Prefrontal Cortex (2013, background): “Phase synchrony has been implicated in WM (Axmacher et al., 2010; Buschman et al., 2011; Fell and Axmacher, 2011), and a recent study has further shown how rapid configuration of synchronized networks in PFC is specific to different rules states (Buschman et al., 2012).”
- The Distributed Nature of Working Memory. (2017, background): “Similarly, the PFC was found to represent color information when individuals were asked to discern clearly categorizable colors, but not when discriminating subtle color hues [31,46].”