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Persistent neural activity in the human frontal cortex when maintaining space that is off the map

Nature Neuroscience volume 12, pages 1463–1468 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

During the maintenance of visuospatial information, neural activity in the frontal eye field (FEF) persists and is thought to be an important neural mechanism for visual working memory. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine whether human FEF activity persists when maintaining auditory space and whether it is selective for retinal versus extra-retinal space. Subjects performed an audiospatial working-memory task using sounds recorded from microphones placed in each subject's ear canals, which preserved the interaural time and level differences that are critical for sound localization. Putative FEF activity persisted when maintaining auditory-cued space, even for locations behind the head to which it is impossible to make saccades. Therefore, human FEF activity represents both retinal and extra-retinal space.

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Figure 1: Task design and behavioral data.
Figure 2: Surface-based statistical maps.
Figure 3: Group-averaged BOLD time courses time locked to the presentation of the sample sound in the three ROIs.
Figure 4: Group-averaged BOLD time courses time locked to the presentation of the sample sound in the sPCS.
Figure 5: Scatter plots quantifying the laterality bias in the sPCS.
Figure 6: Group comparisons of auditory spatial working memory with saccade generation and visual spatial working memory.
Figure 7: Individual subject comparisons of auditory- and visual-cued spatial-working memory.
Figure 8: Individual subject BOLD time courses from the sPCS ROI derived from the saccade localizer task.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Srimal, L. Deouell, S. Inati and K. Sanzenbach for technical support and anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. This work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health (R01 EY016407).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Kyeong-Jin Tark & Clayton E Curtis

  2. Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Clayton E Curtis

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  1. Kyeong-Jin Tark
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  2. Clayton E Curtis
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Contributions

K.J.T. and C.E.C. designed and conducted the experiment, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Clayton E Curtis.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–6, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, and Supplementary Results 1 and 2 (PDF 1359 kb)

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Tark, KJ., Curtis, C. Persistent neural activity in the human frontal cortex when maintaining space that is off the map. Nat Neurosci 12, 1463–1468 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2406

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