Maintenance and transformation of representational formats during working memory prioritization
Visual working memory depends on both material-specific brain areas in the ventral visual stream (VVS) that support the maintenance of stimulus representations and on regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) that control these representations. How executive control prioritizes working memory contents and whether this affects their representational formats remains an open question, however. Here, we analyzed intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings in epilepsy patients with electrodes in VVS and PFC who performed a multi-item working memory task involving a retro-cue. We employed Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) with various Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures to investigate the representational format of prioritized VWM content. While recurrent DNN representations matched PFC representations in the beta band (15-29 Hz) following the retro-cue, they corresponded to VVS representations in a lower frequency range (3-14 Hz) towards the end of the maintenance period. Our findings highlight the distinct coding schemes and representational formats of prioritized content in VVS and PFC.
Authors
- Gui Xue (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7891-8151)
- Daniel Pacheco (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2253-5172)
- Armin Brandt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5217-0325)
- Shuang Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5935-9120)
- Charlotte Roy (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8528-9995)
- Marie-Christin Fellner (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6639-9833)
- Jing Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9167-6190)
- Peter Christoph Reinacher (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1691-546X)
- Nikolai Axmacher (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0475-6492)
- Linglin Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6794-5987)
- Andreas Schulze‐Bonhage (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2382-0506)
- Lukas Kunz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0665-7703)
- Hui Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0843-399X)
Institutions
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK)
- McGovern Institute for Brain Research (US)
- University Hospital Bonn (DE)
- University Medical Center Freiburg (DE)
- Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CN)
- Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (DE)
- Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University (CN)
- Ruhr University Bochum (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2024-09-19
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52541-w
- Citations
- 13
- Primary Topic
- Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 4.11
Funders
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft