A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity
- Working memory and conscious perception are thought to share similar brain mechanisms, yet recent reports of non-conscious working memory challenge this view. Combining visual masking with magnetoencephalography, we investigate the reality of non-conscious working memory and dissect its neural mechanisms. In a spatial delayed-response task, participants reported the location of a subjectively unseen target above chance-level after several seconds. Conscious perception and conscious working memory were characterized by similar signatures: a sustained desynchronization in the alpha/beta band over frontal cortex, and a decodable representation of target location in posterior sensors. During non-conscious working memory, such activity vanished. Our findings contradict models that identify working memory with sustained neural firing, but are compatible with recent proposals of ‘activity-silent’ working memory. We present a theoretical framework and simulations showing how slowly decaying synaptic changes allow cell assemblies to go dormant during the delay, yet be retrieved above chance-level after several seconds.
Author: | Darinka Trübutschek, Sebastien Marti, Andrés Ojeda, Jean-Rémi KingORCiD, Yuanyuan Mi, Misha Tsodyks, Stanislas Dehaene |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-457650 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23871.001 |
ISSN: | 2050-084X |
Pubmed Id: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28718763 |
Parent Title (English): | eLife |
Publisher: | eLife Sciences Publications |
Place of publication: | Cambridge |
Contributor(s): | Tatiana Pasternak |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2017 |
Date of first Publication: | 2017/07/18 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2018/02/27 |
Tag: | Activity-silent; Consciousness; Magnetoencephalography; Neuroscience; Research article; Working memory |
Volume: | 6 |
Issue: | e23871 |
Page Number: | 29 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 29 |
Note: | Copyright Trübutschek et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
HeBIS-PPN: | 431527482 |
Institutes: | Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 57 Biowissenschaften; Biologie / 570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |