Notice: Users may be experiencing issues with displaying some pages on stanfordhealthcare.org. We are working closely with our technical teams to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.
 

Learn about the flu shot, COVID-19 vaccine, and our masking policy »

Stanford Health Care

Cortical and Subcortical Contributions to Short-Term Memory for Orienting Movements. Neuron Kopec, C. D., Erlich, J. C., Brunton, B. W., Deisseroth, K., Brody, C. D. 2015; 88 (2): 367-77

Abstract

Neural activity in frontal cortical areas has been causally linked to short-term memory (STM), but whether this activity is necessary for forming, maintaining, or reading out STM remains unclear. In rats performing a memory-guided orienting task, the frontal orienting fields in cortex (FOF) are considered critical for STM maintenance, and during each trial display a monotonically increasing neural encoding for STM. Here, we transiently inactivated either the FOF or the superior colliculus and found that the resulting impairments in memory-guided orienting performance followed a monotonically decreasing time course, surprisingly opposite to the neural encoding. A dynamical attractor model in which STM relies equally on cortical and subcortical regions reconciled the encoding and inactivation data. We confirmed key predictions of the model, including a time-dependent relationship between trial difficulty and perturbability, and substantial, supralinear, impairment following simultaneous inactivation of the FOF and superior colliculus during memory maintenance.

View details for DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.08.033

View details for PubMedID 26439529

View details for PubMedCentralID PMC5521275