‘Activity-silent’ working memory in prefrontal cortex: a dynamic coding framework

By Mark G. Stokes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2015

748 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Highlights • WM is thought to depend on persistent maintenance of stationary activity states.• However, population-level analyses reveal that brain activity is highly dynamic.• Accumulating evidence implicates activity-silent neural states for WM.• Dynamic coding suggests that WM is encoded in patterns of functional connectivity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/932cd41a15b89d114bf79eeea858b1e62b43b1cc

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Gamma and beta bursts underlie working memory (2016, neutral): “In this view, WM information is only present in brief bursts of spiking and maintained in synaptic changes between such events (Sandberg et al., 2003; Mongillo et al., 2008; Lundqvist et al., 2011; 2012; Stokes, 2015).”
Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis (2020, background): “Beyond MEG and EEG, ignition has been demonstrated in neural ﬁring, both in human and non-human primates.”
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”
The Role of Prefrontal Mixed Selectivity in Cognitive Control (2016, background): “So, even though the response of switch neurons is illustrative of such diversity, coding characteristics can be better evaluated in whole populations (Miller and Fusi, 2013; Stokes, 2015).”
An Interference Model of Visual Working Memory (2017, background): “There is emerging evidence for representations in WM that are “activity-silent” during the retention interval (Stokes, 2015) in particular during periods when other information in WM is cued as relevant (LaRocque, LewisPeacock, Drysdale, Oberauer, & Postle, 2013; Lewis-Peacock, Drysdale, Oberauer,…”
Working Memory 2.0 (2018, background): “Working memories are held between spiking by spiking-induced changes in synaptic weights, ‘‘impressions’’ left in the network (Lundqvist et al., 2011, 2012; Mongillo et al., 2008; Sandberg et al., 2003; Stokes, 2015).”
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).”
Theta-Phase Connectivity between Medial Prefrontal and Posterior Areas Underlies Novel Instructions Implementation (2022, background): “Information on which networks are task-relevant and which should be inhibited could be coded in other aspects of the interactive dynamics between mPFC and posterior areas, such as phase coding or cross-frequency coupling (Helfrich and Knight, 2016), or by means of activity-silent and less resource c”
Time-Based Binding as a Solution to and a Limitation for Flexible Cognition (2021, background): “Whereas originally thought to contribute mainly to long-term memory, recent work suggests that synaptic binding also supports working memory (the synaptic model of working memory; Stokes (2015)).”
Haemodynamic correlates of bilateral 6 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation during working memory enhancement revealed by fNIRS (2026, unknown): “…model proposes that some memory functions can be maintained via transient changes in synaptic weights, remaining in low-ﬁring or even non-ﬁring states, and that information encoding, reactivation, and readout are supported by oscillatory bursts in the gamma and beta bands (Stokes, 2015).”
Prioritizing flexible working memory representations through retrospective attentional strengthening (2023, unknown): “In other words, a higher than chance level off-diagonal decoding accuracy indicates that neural representations of color and space remain stable across time (Stokes, 2015).”
Temporal expectation based on the duration variability modulates alpha oscillations during working memory retention (2022, background): “…of visual representations (D'Esposito and Postle, 2015; Ma et al., 2014; Nobre, 2022) and isolated the patterns of neural activity that represent distinct functional states during the interval of retention (Masse et al., 2020; Nobre and Stokes, 2019; Sreenivasan and D’Esposito, 2019; Stokes, 2015).”
Tracking neural correlates of prioritizing working memory representations through retrospective attentional strengthening (2022, background): “5 In neutral condition, the observation that the decoding accuracies of both target and non-target orientations 6 were at chance level, suggesting that both target and non-target representations are held in activity-silent WM 7 depending on short-term synaptic plasticity (36,37).”
Does rehearsal matter? Left anterior temporal alpha and theta band changes correlate with the beneficial effects of rehearsal on working memory. (2021, unknown): “For example, only information in the focus of attention may be reflected in delay activity, while items outside the focus of attention may actually be represented by activity silent mechanisms (Rose et al., 2016; Stokes, 2015).”
Does rehearsal benefit visual memory? The role of semantic associations in the maintenance of intact and phase-scrambled scenes (2019, unknown): “For example, only information in the focus of attention may be reflected in delay activity, while items outside the focus of attention may actually be represented by activity silent mechanisms (Stokes, 2015; Rose et al., 2016).”
Reorienting Spatial Attention within Visual Working Memory (2019, unknown): “Indeed, dynamic coding in the prefrontal cortex has recently been regarded as the format of VWM storage (Meyers, 2018; Stokes, 2015), in contrast to the traditional view of static sustained activity (Goldman-Rakic, 1995).”