Current and future goals are represented in opposite patterns in object-selective cortex
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
Adaptive behavior requires the separation of current from future goals in working memory. We used fMRI of object-selective cortex to determine the representational (dis)similarities of memory representations serving current and prospective perceptual tasks. Participants remembered an object drawn from three possible categories as the target for one of two consecutive visual search tasks. A cue indicated whether the target object should be looked for first (currently relevant), second (prospectively relevant), or if it could be forgotten (irrelevant). Prior to the first search, representations of current, prospective and irrelevant objects were similar, with strongest decoding for current representations compared to prospective (Experiment 1) and irrelevant (Experiment 2). Remarkably, during the first search, prospective representations could also be decoded, but revealed anti-correlated voxel patterns compared to currently relevant representations of the same category. We propose that the brain separates current from prospective memories within the same neuronal ensembles through opposite representational patterns.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files and source code files have been provided for Figures 2,3,4, 5, S1,S2,S3 and the fMRI data is made available via the open science framework:""Current and Future Goals Are Represented in Opposite Patterns in Object-Selective Cortex."" Open Science Framework. May 31. osf.io/hcp47.For the newly added experiment 2, the data and scripts have also been provided.
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Current and Future Goals Are Represented in Opposite Patterns in Object-Selective CortexOpen Science Framework, osf.io/hcp47.
Article and author information
Author details
Anouk Mariette van Loon
Johannes Jacobus Fahrenfort
Funding
European Research Council (615423)
- Christian N L Olivers
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Human subjects: Twenty-four healthy volunteers participated in Experiment 1 and twenty-five healthy volunteers participated in Experiment 2. The experiment was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Amsterdam and conformed to the Declaration of Helsinki. All subjects provided written informed consent and consent to publish.
Copyright
© 2018, van Loon et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Current and future goals are represented in opposite patterns in object-selective cortex
eLife 7:e38677.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38677
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
