Modelling relative recency discrimination tasks using a stochastic working memory model

Relative recency discrimination (RD) task is typically used to assess the temporal organization function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Subjects look at a series of cards (with words or drawings on them) and on seeing a test card determine which of the two items was seen more recently. Results show that patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex are severely impaired on this task. We propose a memory trace-priming mechanism, based on automatic time-marking process hypothesis (Schacter, D.L., 1987. Memory, amnesia, and frontal lobe dysfunction: a critique and interpretation. Psychobiology 15, 21-36), to offer a computational account of the results. In this model, successive words seen by subjects leave decaying memory traces in PFC, which subsequently prime the representations in higher sensory areas such as inferior temporal Cortex (IT) during discrimination judgements. The paper focuses on the evaluation of a probabilistic pre-frontal trace mechanism using a pool of clusters of neurons with self-sustained firing that ends at a random time. The results show that the probabilistic behavior of subjects can be accounted for by the stochasticity of the trace model. A good fit to experimental data is obtained with a PFC memory persistence probability with a decay time constant of tau = approximately 30 s. The model allows for a distributed representation in IT and PFC, but the best fit suggests a sparse representation. It is concluded that further data are needed on representations in IT and PFC, on the connectivity between these two areas, and on the statistical and dynamic properties of memory neurons in PFC.