Is it possible to account for our patterns of short-term remembering and forgetting, and at the same time, make predictions about what the corresponding neural activity should look like? That is what we tried to do in a recent paper.
Our model suggests that neurons in the prefrontal cortex are critical for storing information in working memory, but that they do not encode that information in patterns of neural activity. Instead, the same pattern might be active for many different memory contents, and vice versa, the same item in memory might elicit different patterns of activity each time it is encoded. But, surprisingly, the model makes deterministic predictions about how these patterns should change. Read more in the article!…