THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF WORKING MEMORY

By Mark D'Esposito, Bradley R. Postle. Annual Review of Psychology, 2007

1,397 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For over 50 years, psychologists and neuroscientists have recognized the importance of a “working memory” to coordinate processing when multiple goals are active, and to guide behavior with information that is not present in the immediate environment. In recent years, psychological theory and cognitive neuroscience data have converged on the idea that information is encoded into working memory via the allocation of attention to internal representations – be they semantic long-term memory (e.g., letters, digits, words), sensory, or motoric. Thus, information-based multivariate analyses of human functional MRI data typically find evidence for the temporary representation of stimuli in regions that also process this information in nonworking-memory contexts. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, exerts control over behavior by biasing the salience of mnemonic representations, and adjudicating among competing, context-dependent rules. The “control of the controller” emerges from a complex interplay between PFC and striatal circuits, and ascending dopaminergic neuromodulatory signals.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ad0b9c4992a944a66b6562df511272b036762eb

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Citations in the corpus

Conclusions about Interventions, Programs, and Approaches for Improving Executive Functions that appear Justified and those that, despite much hype, do not (2015, background): “Do the answers to these differ by individual characteristics such as age or gender?”
The Distributed Nature of Working Memory. (2017, background): “More recent accounts of distributed working memory have emphasized different timescales of retention in different brain areas [140,141], the role of attentional processes in the retention of memories [4,11,142], and the utility of synaptic plasticity and dynamic firing trajectories for working memor”
Causal Evidence for a Role of Theta and Alpha Oscillations in the Control of Working Memory (2020, background): “Working memory (WM) relies on the prioritization of relevant information and suppression of irrelevant information [1, 2].”
Human intracranial correlates of dynamic coding in auditory working memory (2026, unknown): “…has been shifting from the “where” in the brain is WM maintained to the neurophysiological question of “how” neurons maintain information of WM content (Barak & Tsodyks, 2014; Christophel et al., 2017; D'Esposito & Postle, 2015; Miller, Lundqvist, & Bastos, 2018; Serences, 2016; Stokes, 2015).”
Multiplexed Levels of Cognitive Control through Delta and Theta Neural Oscillations (2024, background): “Previous studies of the role of LPFC in cognitive control have shown that it is involved in maintaining relevant information about abstract rules (D ’ Esposito & Postle, 2015; Curtis & D ’ Esposito, 2003) and integrating such information with inputs from posterior association and sensory cortices,…”
Visual field map size constrains working memory precision (2026, unknown): “Because cortical areas associated with visual working memory are shared with those subserving visual perception (Curtis & D’Esposito, 2003; D’Esposito & Postle, 2015; Serences, 2016) , we inferred that they may also share properties determining individual differences; more specifically, we…”
Haemodynamic correlates of bilateral 6 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation during working memory enhancement revealed by fNIRS (2026, unknown): “Meanwhile, working memory is not conﬁned to a single region but relies on distributed representations within networks such as the prefrontal–parietal system, which support the selective encoding of task-relevant information (D’Esposito and Postle, 2015).”
Alpha phase coding supports feature binding during working memory maintenance (2026, unknown): “…WM, which states that visual information is maintained in the same stimulus-selective regions that are responsible for perceiving that information 2,70 – 73 , as well as with the ‘ distributed system view ’ of WM 74,75 , which states that WM storage is distributed across multiple brain regions,…”
Top-down selection of visual working memory contents is supported by alpha-band phase-synchronized oscillatory networks (2025, unknown): “It has been suggested to comprise a distinct short-term storage of sensory information and executive processes ( Baddeley, 2012; D’Esposito & Postle, 2015; Klingberg, 2010).”