Spatial working memory alters the efficacy of input to visual cortex

Prefrontal cortex modulates sensory signals in extrastriate visual cortex, in part via its direct projections from the frontal eye field (FEF), an area involved in selective attention. We find that working memory-related activity is a dominant signal within FEF input to visual cortex. Although this signal alone does not evoke spiking responses in areas V4 and MT during memory, the gain of visual responses in these areas increases, and neuronal receptive fields expand and shift towards the remembered location, improving the stimulus representation by neuronal populations. These results provide a basis for enhancing the representation of working memory targets and implicate persistent FEF activity as a basis for the interdependence of working memory and selective attention. Frontal eye field (FEF) is a visual prefrontal area involved in top-down attention. Here the authors report that FEF neurons projecting to V4/MT are persistently active during spatial working memory, and V4/MT neurons show changes in receptive field and gain at the location held in working memory.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2017-04-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/ncomms15041PMID 28447609PMCID 5414175
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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