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Updated: Oct 5, 2025
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Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)
Published on: June 12, 2017
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Dependence of Working Memory on Coordinated Activity Across Brain Areas
Ehsan Rezayat1, Kelsey Clark2, Mohammad-Reza A Dehaqani1,3
1School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran.
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
|January 31, 2022
Summary
Inter-areal synchrony, or brain area coordination, is crucial for working memory (WM). This review highlights synchrony
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
Background:
- Working memory (WM) relies on distributed neural networks.
- Neural signatures of WM include local firing rates, oscillatory power, and inter-areal synchrony.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review intracranial neurophysiological recordings of WM in primates.
- To evaluate the predictive power of different neural signatures for WM performance.
- To propose a framework for prefrontal-sensory interactions in WM.
Main Methods:
- Literature review of intracranial neurophysiological recordings in primates during WM tasks.
- Analysis of neural signatures: firing rate, local oscillatory power, and inter-areal synchrony.
- Examination of causal studies manipulating inter-areal synchrony.
Main Results:
- Inter-areal synchrony robustly predicts WM performance, surpassing within-area signatures.
- Altered inter-areal synchrony is observed in brain disorders.
- Causal manipulation of synchrony effectively influences WM task performance.
Conclusions:
- Inter-areal synchrony plays a critical role in working memory.
- A framework for prefrontal-sensory interactions during WM is proposed.
- Synchrony provides a unifying explanation for WM neural mechanisms.
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