The causal role of auditory cortex in auditory working memory
- East China Normal University, China
Abstract
Working memory (WM), the ability to actively hold information in memory over a delay period of seconds, is a fundamental constituent of cognition. Delay-period activity in sensory cortices has been observed in WM tasks, but whether and when the activity plays a functional role for memory maintenance remains unclear. Here we investigated the causal role of auditory cortex (AC) for memory maintenance in mice performing an auditory WM task. Electrophysiological recordings revealed that AC neurons were active not only during the presentation of the auditory stimulus but also early in the delay period. Furthermore, optogenetic suppression of neural activity in AC during the stimulus epoch and early delay period impaired WM performance, whereas suppression later in the delay period did not. Thus, AC is essential for information encoding and maintenance in auditory WM task, especially during the early delay period.
Data availability
Data deposited in Dryad Digital Repository, accessible here: doi:10.5061/dryad.8gtht76nf. Reviewer Link: https://datadryad.org/stash/share/izZSpsIhujfbQbO8rAcXZ54ZBhyev1JIV1RHfpIaV3U
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (20ZR1417800)
- Jinghong Xu
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31970925)
- Liping Yu
Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (19ZR1416500)
- Liping Yu
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31400944)
- Jinghong Xu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experiments were performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the US National Institutes of Health. The protocol was approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of East China Normal University, Shanghai, China (m20160302).
Copyright
© 2021, Yu 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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The causal role of auditory cortex in auditory working memory
eLife 10:e64457.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64457
