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Working memory freed from the past

Working memory is influenced by past experiences. An area of the rat brain has now been identified that represents recent history — silencing this area can remove biases from working memory and decision-making.
  1. Laura Busse

    1. Laura Busse is in the Division of Neurobiology, Department of Biology II, LMU Munich, Munich 82152, Germany.

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Our natural environment is characterized by statistical regularities in both space and time — for example, it does not consist of randomly distributed light, but frequently contains objects that have elongated vertical and horizontal contours1 and predictable motion2. These regularities are exploited by our brains to interpret the often-ambiguous information that reaches our senses, to improve perception, decision-making and working memory. Although, in the natural world, past experiences can thus have a vital role in information processing and cognition, past experiences can impair performance in laboratory experiments that involve random structure. In a paper in Nature, Akrami et al.3 take advantage of this difference to identify an area of the rat brain that holds recent sensory history, and show that temporarily silencing this area removes history-related biases in memory-guided decision-making.

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Nature 554, 306-307 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-01418-2

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