Keeping Memory Clear and Stable--The Contribution of Human Basal Ganglia and Prefrontal Cortex to Working Memory

Baier, Bernhard; Karnath, Hans‐Otto; Dieterich, Marianne; Birklein, Frank; Heinze, Carolin; Müller, Notger G.

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.1513-10.2010

Cited by 128 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Activation focus shifted to a more process-specific region: activation increased in the striatum in the training and the transfer task. Improved WM updating and increased striatal activation is consistent with theories that describe striatum's role in WM updating (Frank et al, 2001;Gruber et al, 2006;Baier et al, 2010;Voytek and Knight, 2010). The striatum is required in regulating which information enters WM (Alexander et al, 1986;McNab and Klingberg, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Transfer after Dualn-Back Training Depends on Striatal Activation Change

et al. 2016

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The dual n-back working memory (WM) training paradigm (comprising auditory and visual stimuli) has gained much attention since studies have shown widespread transfer effects. By including a multimodal dual-task component, the task is demanding to the human cognitive system. We investigated whether dual n-back training improves general cognitive resources or a task-specific WM updating process in participants. We expected: (1) widespread transfer effects and the recruitment of a common neuronal network by the training and the transfer tasks and (2) narrower transfer results and that a common activation network alone would not produce transfer, but instead an activation focus on the striatum, which is associated with WM updating processes. The training group showed transfer to an untrained dual-modality WM updating task, but not to single-task versions of the training or the transfer task. They also showed diminished neuronal overlap between the training and the transfer task from pretest to posttest and an increase in striatal activation in both tasks. Furthermore, we found an association between the striatal activation increase and behavioral improvement. The control groups showed no transfer and no change in the amount of activation overlap or in striatal activation from pretest to posttest. We conclude that, instead of improving general cognitive resources (which would have required a transfer effect to all transfer tasks and that a frontal activation overlap between the tasks produced transfer), dual n-back training improved a task-specific process: WM updating of stimuli from two modalities.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Transfer after Dualn-Back Training Depends on Striatal Activation Change

et al. 2016

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“…The BG deficits are proposed to be due to a general deficit in the manipulation of internally represented stimuli (36). Human neuroimaging shows that activity in the BG and PFC is associated with individual differences in VWM capacity and that BG activity is specifically associated with filtering out irrelevant distracting information (9,37), consistent with gating models of BG function and stimulus manipulation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 72%

“…The deficits may also be due in part to a failure to filter out irrelevant information (9,37). Even though our protocol had no explicit distractors, the BG have been reported to play an important role in filtering out irrelevant information, and, thus, the stimulus information that is to be reinforced may be degrading over time due to increased ambient noise from the visual world.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia contributions to visual working memory

Voytek

Knight

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

165

116

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Visual working memory (VWM) is a remarkable skill dependent on the brain's ability to construct and hold an internal representation of the world for later comparison with an external stimulus. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) and basal ganglia (BG) interact within a cortical and subcortical network supporting VWM. We used scalp electroencephalography in groups of patients with unilateral PFC or BG lesions to provide evidence that these regions play complementary but dissociable roles in VWM. PFC patients show behavioral and electrophysiological deficits manifested by attenuation of extrastriate attention and VWM-related neural activity only for stimuli presented to the contralesional visual field. In contrast, patients with BG lesions show behavioral and electrophysiological VWM deficits independent of the hemifield of stimulus presentation but have intact extrastriate attention activity. The results support a model wherein the PFC is critical for top-down intrahemispheric modulation of attention and VWM with the BG involved in global support of VWM processes.attention | electroencephalography | lesion | stroke E ven a seemingly simple action such as determining which of two bananas is riper requires us to compare real world visual information, such as the color of the banana you are currently looking at in the store, with your memory of the yellowness of the other banana you just put down. This relies in part on visual working memory (VWM), a remarkable ability wherein we construct and hold an internal model of a real-world visual stimulus that we then later compare against another stimulus. In essence, we construct and hold a model of the visual world and compare that model against subsequent inputs from the external world. VWM relies upon an intact and functioning prefrontal cortex (PFC), and damage to this region, such as from stroke, causes VWM impairments (1-3). However, cognitive processes do not localize to specific brain regions per se and a behavior as complex as VWM recruits a distributed network of cortical and subcortical structures (4-8), including the basal ganglia (BG) (9, 10) and visual extrastriate regions (11)(12)(13).Most computational models of VWM rely upon intercommunication between the PFC and the striatum such that memories are maintained via recurrent activation in fronto-striatal loops (14-16). In vivo, working memory maintenance is associated with sustained delay-period activity in the PFC (5, 17) and BG (18), although the BG are thought to play a role in gating information into the PFC to allow it to update representations where necessary (19). Although neurons in both visual extrastriate and the PFC maintain VWM representations during delay periods, PFC neurons encode more information about the stimuli and are more resistant to distractors than visual extrastriate neurons (20). Animal research shows that the BG rapidly learn task-relevant rules and may send relevant, preprocessed information to the PFC for subsequent selection and further processing (21). Anatomically, the BG are situate...

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“…The observation that this "filter activity" was associated with interindividual differences in WM capacity suggests that frontal areas and basal ganglia exert top-down control over WM representations. Evidence from recent clinical studies further underlines the relevance of an intact PFC and basal ganglia for WM performance (Baier et al, 2010;Voytek and Knight, 2010). Thus, top-down control over information selectively encoded and maintained seems to be closely related to a fronto-parietal and fronto-striatal network.…”

Section: Functional Neuroanatomy Of the Working Memory Networkmentioning

confidence: 96%

Lifespan age differences in working memory: A two-component framework

Sander

Lindenberger

Werkle‐Bergner

2012

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

129

101

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a b s t r a c tWe suggest that working memory (WM) performance can be conceptualized as the interplay of low-level feature binding processes and top-down control, relating to posterior and frontal brain regions and their interaction in a distributed neural network. We propose that due to age-differential trajectories of posterior and frontal brain regions top-down control processes are not fully mature until young adulthood and show marked decline with advancing age, whereas binding processes are relatively mature in children, but show senescent decline in older adults. A review of the literature spanning from middle childhood to old age shows that binding and top-down control processes undergo profound changes across the lifespan. We illustrate commonalities and dissimilarities between children, younger adults, and older adults reflecting the change in the two components' relative contribution to visual WM performance across the lifespan using results from our own lab. We conclude that an integrated account of visual WM lifespan changes combining research from behavioral neuroscience and cognitive psychology of child development as well as aging research opens avenues to advance our understanding of cognition in general.

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Keeping Memory Clear and Stable--The Contribution of Human Basal Ganglia and Prefrontal Cortex to Working Memory

Cited by 128 publications

References 20 publications

Transfer after Dualn-Back Training Depends on Striatal Activation Change

Transfer after Dualn-Back Training Depends on Striatal Activation Change

Prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia contributions to visual working memory

Lifespan age differences in working memory: A two-component framework

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