TY  - JOUR
A1  - Trübutschek, Darinka
A1  - Marti, Sebastien
A1  - Ojeda, Andrés
A1  - King, Jean-Rémi
A1  - Mi, Yuanyuan
A1  - Tsodyks, Misha
A1  - Dehaene, Stanislas
T1  - A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity
T2  - eLife
N2  - 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.
KW  - Research article
KW  - Neuroscience
KW  - Working memory
KW  - Consciousness
KW  - Activity-silent
KW  - Magnetoencephalography
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45765
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-457650
SN  - 2050-084X
N1  - 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.
VL  - 6
IS  - e23871
SP  - 1
EP  - 29
PB  - eLife Sciences Publications
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -