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Parallel visuospatial and audiospatial working memory processes in the monkey dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Abstract

The dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in primates is involved in visuospatial working memory1,2, but the cellular basis of spatial working memory for auditory information is poorly understood. Here we examined dorsolateral PFC neurons using visual and auditory oculomotor delayed-response tasks. We found that the dorsolateral PFC contains two groups of neurons, each showing directional delay-period activity depending on the location of the visual or auditory cue, suggesting that parallel neuronal processes for visual and auditory spatial working memory occur in the dorsolateral PFC.

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Figure 1: Delay-period activities in the VODR and AODR tasks.
Figure 2: Onset latency and discriminative ability index (DI).

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Iba and S. Tsujimoto for their help with histological experiments. This work was supported by a grant-in-aid (08279105) for Scientific Research on Priority Areas to T.S. from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture and a Research Fellowship grant (JSPS-H11-DC1-05832) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists.

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Correspondence to T. Sawaguchi.

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Kikuchi-Yorioka, Y., Sawaguchi, T. Parallel visuospatial and audiospatial working memory processes in the monkey dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Nat Neurosci 3, 1075–1076 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/80581

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