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Updated: Jul 24, 2025
09:05
Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)
Published on: June 12, 2017
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A recruitment through coherence theory of working memory
Phillip Comeaux1, Kelsey Clark2, Behrad Noudoost2
1Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, University of Utah, 36 S. Wasatch Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA; Dept. of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of Utah, 65 Mario Capecchi Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84132, USA.
Progress in Neurobiology
|July 1, 2023
Summary
This study proposes a framework for how the prefrontal cortex communicates with sensory areas during working memory. It suggests top-down signals drive brain oscillations, enabling information transfer via spike timing and phase-locked activity.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Decades of research have explored prefrontal cortex (PFC) interactions in working memory (WM).
- Existing models often focus on specific neural mechanisms without a unifying framework.
- Understanding PFC-sensory interactions is crucial for explaining WM capacity and flexibility.
Purpose of the Study:
- To present a conceptual framework for PFC-WM interactions.
- To review evidence supporting the proposed model.
- To discuss broader implications for inter-brain area communication.
Main Methods:
- Conceptual modeling based on existing literature.
- Review of empirical evidence from neuroscience studies.
- Analysis of neural oscillations and spike timing data.
Main Results:
- A proposed framework where PFC sends top-down signals to sensory areas, driving oscillations.
- Spike timing in sensory areas locks to these oscillations, encoding information in spike phase.
- Downstream areas decode this information using oscillatory coherence and phase-dependent gating.
Conclusions:
- The framework offers a unified explanation for PFC-WM interactions.
- Spike-phase coding within driven oscillations is a key mechanism for information transfer.
- The model has implications for understanding flexible neural communication beyond working memory.
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