Short-term memory articles from across Nature Portfolio

How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between brain regions to support different functional processes in memory.

Visual memory has traditionally been thought of as all-or-none, with items remembered perfectly or completely forgotten. In this Review, Brady and colleagues synthesize work that indicates that visual memory representations in working memory and long-term memory are not all-or-none but are instead noisy and hierarchical.

It has been proposed that the amygdala is required for the familiarity aspect of item recognition. By studying the performance of monkeys with selective amygdala lesions on four converging memory paradigms, the authors demonstrate that the amygdala is not necessary for familiarity memory, but confirm its role in reward processing.

Different interneuron populations modulate delay activity representing action plans in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

A working memory representation goes missing in monkey parietal cortex during categorization learning, but is still found in the prefrontal cortex.