An intensely stressful experience can itself activate memories that are unrelated to the stressful experience. This previously unknown property of stress could help explain how traumatic memories become pathological.
Many cells in prefrontal cortex show enhanced activity prior to movement onset in delayed or memory-guided saccade tasks. This activity is a possible neural correlate of spatial attention and working memory. The goal of this study was to determine whether delay activity is evoked when non-spatial cues such as color are used to guide saccades. Monkeys were trained on a saccade target selection task in which they were cued for either the location or color of the rewarded target. When the location of the target was specified explicitly, many cells showed visual responses and delay activity that were spatially selective. Color selective visual responses or delay activity were both rare and weak. However, for many cells, spatially selective delay activity could be evoked when color was used to specify the location of the target. These results indicate that color is capable of eliciting spatially selective activity from cells that have no overt color selectivity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.