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Prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia control access to working memory

Abstract

Our capacity to store information in working memory might be determined by the degree to which only relevant information is remembered. The question remains as to how this selection of relevant items to be remembered is accomplished. Here we show that activity in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia preceded the filtering of irrelevant information and that activity, particularly in the globus pallidus, predicted the extent to which only relevant information is stored. The preceding frontal and basal ganglia activity were also associated with inter-individual differences in working memory capacity. These findings reveal a mechanism by which frontal and basal ganglia activity exerts attentional control over access to working memory storage in the parietal cortex in humans, and makes an important contribution to inter-individual differences in working memory capacity.

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Figure 1: The distraction condition (one third of trials) and the no distraction condition (one third of trials) included in the scanning task (see the manuscript text).
Figure 2: Preparatory filtering set activity.
Figure 3: Correlations between working memory capacity and preparatory filtering set activity.
Figure 4: Correlations between preparatory filtering set activity and unnecessary storage activity.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank G. Leroux, P. Fransson, F. Edin, A. Compte and A.-C. Ingridsson for their help. This work was supported by the Foundation for Strategic Research and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

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F.M. and T.K. designed the tasks and wrote the manuscript together. F.M. conducted the experiments and analyzed the data.

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Correspondence to Torkel Klingberg.

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McNab, F., Klingberg, T. Prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia control access to working memory. Nat Neurosci 11, 103–107 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn2024

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