Fixed and flexible: Dynamic prefrontal activations and working memory capacity relationships vary with memory demand
Name
nihms-1544887.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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637.15 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
7e79a970eae98a3b65c9b82b8c85a7e3
Author(s)
Shah, Ashti M
Grotzinger, Hannah M
Kaczmarzyk, Jakub R
Powell, Lindsey J
Yücel, Meryem Ayşe
Gabrieli, John D. E.
Hubbard, Nicholas
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Cognitive Neuroscience
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Citation
Shah, Ashti M, Grotzinger, Hannah, Kaczmarzyk, Jakub R, Powell, Lindsey J, Yücel, Meryem Ayşe et al. 2020. "Fixed and flexible: Dynamic prefrontal activations and working memory capacity relationships vary with memory demand." Cognitive Neuroscience, 11 (4).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation during encoding of memoranda (proactive responses) is associated with better working memory (WM) compared to reactive/retrieval-based activation. This suggests that dynamic PFC activation patterns may be fixed, based upon one’s WM ability, with individuals who have greater WM ability relying more on proactive processes and individuals with lesser WM ability relying more on reactive processes. We newly tested whether this heuristic applied when challenging an individual’s WM capacity. Twenty-two participants (N = 22) underwent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during a modified Sternberg WM paradigm. We tested whether the relationship between dynamic PFC activation patterns and WM capacity changed, as a function of WM demands (N = 14 after quality control). Here, higher-WM capacity was associated with more proactive PFC patterns, but only when WM capacity was overloaded. Lower-WM capacity was associated with these same patterns, but only when WM demand was low. Findings are inconsistent with a purely fixed view of dynamic PFC activation patterns and suggest higher- and lower-WM-capacity individuals flexibly engage PFC processes in a fundamentally different manner, dependent upon current WM demands.
MIT Department
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2019.1694500
