Shared mechanisms underlie the control of working memory and attention

By Matthew F. Panichello, Timothy J. Buschman. 2021

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive control guides behaviour by controlling what, when, and how information is represented in the brain1. For example, attention controls sensory processing; top-down signals from prefrontal and parietal cortex strengthen the representation of task-relevant stimuli2–4. A similar ‘selection’ mechanism is thought to control the representations held ‘in mind’—in working memory5–10. Here we show that shared neural mechanisms underlie the selection of items from working memory and attention to sensory stimuli. We trained rhesus monkeys to switch between two tasks, either selecting one item from a set of items held in working memory or attending to one stimulus from a set of visual stimuli. Neural recordings showed that similar representations in prefrontal cortex encoded the control of both selection and attention, suggesting that prefrontal cortex acts as a domain-general controller. By contrast, both attention and selection were represented independently in parietal and visual cortex. Both selection and attention facilitated behaviour by enhancing and transforming the representation of the selected memory or attended stimulus. Specifically, during the selection task, memory items were initially represented in independent subspaces of neural activity in prefrontal cortex. Selecting an item caused its representation to transform from its own subspace to a new subspace used to guide behaviour. A similar transformation occurred for attention. Our results suggest that prefrontal cortex controls cognition by dynamically transforming representations to control what and when cognitive computations are engaged. The prefrontal cortex in monkeys controls working memory in a similar way to attention, by selectively transforming the representations of remembered items.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Orthogonal representations for robust context-dependent task performance in brains and neural networks (2022, neutral): “Notably, similar evolutions of representational geometries over the time course of a trial have recently been reported in the context of working memory tasks (Panichello and Buschman, 2021).”
Human Beta Oscillations Reflect Magnitude and Fidelity of Priority Shifts in Working Memory (2026, unknown): “Neurally, prioritized and deprioritized WM items may be represented in di ﬀ erent brain areas (Christophel et al., 2018) and representational formats (van Loon et al., 2018; Yu et al., 2020; Iamshchinina et al., 2021; Panichello and Buschman, 2021; El-Gaby et al., 2024; Paluch et al., 2025).”
Top-down selection of visual working memory contents is supported by alpha-band phase-synchronized oscillatory networks (2025, unknown): “While manipulation and executive control of VWM are consistently associated with prefrontal cortical (PFC) activity ( Panichello & Buschman, 2021; Yu & Postle, 2021), it has remained under debate whether the representational functions arise within sensory cortices, the PFC, or from distributed…”
Strengthening of alpha synchronization is a neural correlate of cognitive transfer (2024, background): “This aligns with the notion that the control of visuospatial attention and VSWM share a common neural substrate (Ikkai and Curtis 2011; Panichello and Buschman 2021).”
Prioritizing flexible working memory representations through retrospective attentional strengthening (2023, unknown): “The pre-cue WM task has been widely used previously (Panichello and Buschman, 2021; Vogel and Machizawa, 2004; Zhao et al., 2022a).”
Changes in behavioral priority influence the accessibility but not the quality of working memory content (2022, background): “The neural consequences of assigning priority to specific WM content can be studied by measuring brain activity linked with WM storage while participants perform a retrospectively cued memory task (Griffin & Nobre, 2003; Lewis-Peacock et al., 2012; Ester et al., 2018; Panichello & Buschman, 2021).”
Tracking neural correlates of prioritizing working memory representations through retrospective attentional strengthening (2022, methodology): “The pre-cue WM task has been widely used previously (15,16).”
Neural Mechanisms of Bidirectional Visuo‐Linguistic Transformation in Interactive Communication (2026, unknown): “This pattern aligns with evidence that parietal cortex regulates visual information flow through gating mechanisms (Panichello and Buschman 2021), and that IPS plays a critical role in binding content to context during working memory, with activity that is sensitive to task demands (Cai et al.…”