Neural substrates of cognitive capacity limitations
Name
Buschman-2011-July-Neural substrates of.pdf
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399.56 KB
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Author(s)
Buschman, Tim
Siegel, Markus
Roy, Jefferson
Miller, Earl K.
Date Issued
June 2011
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Citation
Buschman, T. J. et al. “Neural substrates of cognitive capacity limitations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.27 (2011): 11252-11255. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Cognition has a severely limited capacity: Adult humans can retain only about four items “in mind”. This limitation is fundamental to human brain function: Individual capacity is highly correlated with intelligence measures and capacity is reduced in neuropsychiatric diseases. Although human capacity limitations are well studied, their mechanisms have not been investigated at the single-neuron level. Simultaneous recordings from monkey parietal and frontal cortex revealed that visual capacity limitations occurred immediately upon stimulus encoding and in a bottom-up manner. Capacity limitations were found to reflect a dual model of working memory. The left and right halves of visual space had independent capacities and thus are discrete resources. However, within each hemifield, neural information about successfully remembered objects was reduced by adding further objects, indicating that resources are shared. Together, these results suggest visual capacity limitation is due to discrete, slot-like, resources, each containing limited pools of neural information that can be divided among objects.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1104666108
