Working memory control dynamics follow principles of spatial computing
Name
s41467-023-36555-4.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.01 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Lundqvist, Mikael
Brincat, Scott L
Rose, Jonas
Warden, Melissa R
Buschman, Timothy J
Miller, Earl K
Herman, Pawel
Date Issued
March 14, 2023
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Lundqvist, Mikael, Brincat, Scott L, Rose, Jonas, Warden, Melissa R, Buschman, Timothy J et al. 2023. "Working memory control dynamics follow principles of spatial computing." Nature Communications, 14 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
AbstractWorking memory (WM) allows us to remember and selectively control a limited set of items. Neural evidence suggests it is achieved by interactions between bursts of beta and gamma oscillations. However, it is not clear how oscillations, reflecting coherent activity of millions of neurons, can selectively control individual WM items. Here we propose the novel concept of spatial computing where beta and gamma interactions cause item-specific activity to flow spatially across the network during a task. This way, control-related information such as item order is stored in the spatial activity independent of the detailed recurrent connectivity supporting the item-specific activity itself. The spatial flow is in turn reflected in low-dimensional activity shared by many neurons. We verify these predictions by analyzing local field potentials and neuronal spiking. We hypothesize that spatial computing can facilitate generalization and zero-shot learning by utilizing spatial component as an additional information encoding dimension.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36555-4
