scholarly journals Encoding of Serial Order in Working Memory: Neuronal Activity in Motor, Premotor, and Prefrontal Cortex during a Memory Scanning Task

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (21) ◽  
pp. 4912-4933 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam F. Carpenter ◽  
Gabriel Baud-Bovy ◽  
Apostolos P. Georgopoulos ◽  
Giuseppe Pellizzer
2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna A. E. Vinkhuyzen ◽  
Sophie van der Sluis ◽  
Dorret I. Boomsma ◽  
Eco J. C. de Geus ◽  
Danielle Posthuma

2011 ◽  
Vol 106 (5) ◽  
pp. 2180-2188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Zhou ◽  
Xue-Lian Qi ◽  
Kristy Douglas ◽  
Kathini Palaninathan ◽  
Hyun Sug Kang ◽  
...  

The prefrontal cortex, a cortical area essential for working memory and higher cognitive functions, is modulated by a number of neurotransmitter systems, including acetylcholine; however, the impact of cholinergic transmission on prefrontal activity is not well understood. We relied on systemic administration of a muscarinic receptor antagonist, scopolamine, to investigate the role of acetylcholine on primate prefrontal neuronal activity during execution of working memory tasks and recorded neuronal activity with chronic electrode arrays and single electrodes. Our results indicated a dose-dependent decrease in behavioral performance after scopolamine administration in all the working memory tasks we tested. The effect could not be accounted for by deficits in visual processing, eye movement responses, or attention, because the animals performed a visually guided saccade task virtually error free, and errors to distracting stimuli were not increased. Performance degradation under scopolamine was accompanied by decreased firing rate of the same cortical sites during the delay period of the task and decreased selectivity for the spatial location of the stimuli. These results demonstrate that muscarinic blockade impairs performance in working memory tasks and prefrontal activity mediating working memory.


2013 ◽  
Vol 110 (11) ◽  
pp. 2648-2660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Zhou ◽  
Dantong Zhu ◽  
Xue-Lian Qi ◽  
Cynthia J. Lees ◽  
Allyson J. Bennett ◽  
...  

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex matures late into adolescence or early adulthood. This pattern of maturation mirrors working memory abilities, which continue to improve into adulthood. However, the nature of the changes that prefrontal neuronal activity undergoes during this process is poorly understood. We investigated behavioral performance and neural activity in working memory tasks around the time of puberty, a developmental event associated with the release of sex hormones and significant neurological change. The developmental stages of male rhesus monkeys were evaluated with a series of morphometric, hormonal, and radiographic measures. Peripubertal monkeys were trained to perform an oculomotor delayed response task and a variation of this task involving a distractor stimulus. We found that the peripubertal monkeys tended to abort a relatively large fraction of trials, and these were associated with low levels of task-related neuronal activity. However, for completed trials, accuracy in the delayed saccade task was high and the appearance of a distractor stimulus did not impact performance significantly. In correct trials delay period activity was robust and was not eliminated by the presentation of a distracting stimulus, whereas in trials that resulted in errors the sustained cue-related activity was significantly weaker. Our results show that in peripubertal monkeys the prefrontal cortex is capable of generating robust persistent activity in the delay periods of working memory tasks, although in general it may be more prone to stochastic failure than in adults.


2013 ◽  
Vol 06 (01) ◽  
pp. 1350002 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUNHUA XU ◽  
WENWEN BAI ◽  
XIN TIAN

Neuronal ensemble activity codes working memory. In this work, we developed a neuronal ensemble sparse coding method, which can effectively reduce the dimension of the neuronal activity and express neural coding. Multichannel spike trains were recorded in rat prefrontal cortex during a work memory task in Y-maze. As discrete signals, spikes were transferred into continuous signals by estimating entropy. Then the normalized continuous signals were decomposed via non-negative sparse method. The non-negative components were extracted to reconstruct a low-dimensional ensemble, while none of the feature components were missed. The results showed that, for well-trained rats, neuronal ensemble activities in the prefrontal cortex changed dynamically during the working memory task. And the neuronal ensemble is more explicit via using non-negative sparse coding. Our results indicate that the neuronal ensemble sparse coding method can effectively reduce the dimension of neuronal activity and it is a useful tool to express neural coding.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (11) ◽  
pp. 2680-2689 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Artchakov ◽  
D. Tikhonravov ◽  
Y. Ma ◽  
T. Neuvonen ◽  
I. Linnankoski ◽  
...  

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