Cortical and Subcortical Contributions to Short-Term Memory for Orienting Movements

摘要: Neural activity in frontal cortical areas has been causally linked to short-term memory (STM), but whether this is necessary for forming, maintaining, or reading out STM remains unclear. In rats performing a memory-guided orienting task, the fields cortex (FOF) are considered critical maintenance, and during each trial display monotonically increasing neural encoding STM. Here, we transiently inactivated either FOF superior colliculus found that resulting impairments performance followed decreasing time course, surprisingly opposite encoding. A dynamical attractor model which relies equally on subcortical regions reconciled inactivation data. We confirmed key predictions of model, including time-dependent relationship between difficulty perturbability, substantial, supralinear, impairment following simultaneous maintenance.