Neuronal correlates of parametric working memory in the prefrontal cortex

Ranulfo Romo (), Carlos D. Brody, Adrián Hernández and Luis Lemus
Additional contact information
Ranulfo Romo: Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autonáma de México
Carlos D. Brody: Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autonáma de México
Adrián Hernández: Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autonáma de México
Luis Lemus: Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autonáma de México

Nature, 1999, vol. 399, issue 6735, 470-473

Abstract: Abstract Humans and monkeys have similar abilities to discriminate the difference in frequency between two mechanical vibrations applied sequentially to the fingertips1,2,3. A key component of this sensory task is that the second stimulus is compared with the trace left by the first (base) stimulus, which must involve working memory. Where and how is this trace held in the brain? This question was investigated by recording from single neurons in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys while they performed the somatosensory discrimination task. Here we describe neurons in the inferior convexity of the prefrontal cortex whose discharge rates varied, during the delay period between the two stimuli, as a monotonic function of the base stimulus frequency. We describe this as ‘monotonic stimulus encoding’, and we suggest that the result may generalize: monotonic stimulus encoding may be the basic representation of one-dimensional sensory stimulus quantities in working memory. Thus we predict that other behavioural tasks that require ordinal comparisons between scalar analogue stimuli would give rise to monotonic responses similar to those reported here.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/20939 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:399:y:1999:i:6735:d:10.1038_20939

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/20939

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().