Conferencia: «Mechanisms of distributed working memory in the brain»

Seminario impartido por Jorge F. Mejías. University of Amsterdam.

Abstract: Working memory is defined as the ability of the brain to retain and manipulate information over short periods of time. While traditionally associated with persistent neural firing in prefrontal cortex, mounting evidence suggests that neural correlates of working memory can be found across multiple cortical areas beyond prefrontal cortex, and often with simultaneous multi-area activation patterns. However, the origin of such distributed working memory activity is at the moment not understood. In this talk, I will present a novel mechanism based on long-range activity reverberation that supports the emergence of large-scale persistent activity patterns across the cortex. These patterns encode and retain selective information distributed across multiple cortical areas, and emerge even in situations in which the classical working memory model based on local synaptic reverberation is ineffective. The mechanism is implemented on an anatomically constrained large-scale network of the macaque cortex and leads to experimentally testable predictions on the size and activity profile of the distributed attractors, the strength of local synaptic connections, the effect of distractors in working memory tasks, and the consequences of area-specific lesions.

• Fecha: Viernes 10 de Mayo de 2019
• Lugar: Seminario de informática del Área de Física de la Materia. Planta baja del edificio de Física. Facultad de Ciencias.
• Horario: 11:00 h.
• Organiza: Grupo de Física Estadística y de los Sistemas Complejos
• Más información:
  Daniel Manzano
  manzano@onsager.ugr.es