Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, United States.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, United States.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2018 Sep;153(Pt A):104-110. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2018.04.008. Epub 2018 Apr 23.
A growing body of evidence suggests that short-term memory does not only store the identity of recently experienced stimuli, but also information about when they were presented. This representation of 'what' happened 'when' constitutes a neural timeline of recent past. Behavioral results suggest that people can sequentially access memories for the recent past, as if they were stored along a timeline to which attention is sequentially directed. In the short-term judgment of recency (JOR) task, the time to choose between two probe items depends on the recency of the more recent probe but not on the recency of the more remote probe. This pattern of results suggests a backward self-terminating search model. We review recent neural evidence from the macaque lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) (Tiganj, Cromer, Roy, Miller, & Howard, in press) and behavioral evidence from human JOR task (Singh & Howard, 2017) bearing on this question. Notably, both lines of evidence suggest that the timeline is logarithmically compressed as predicted by Weber-Fechner scaling. Taken together, these findings provide an integrative perspective on temporal organization and neural underpinnings of short-term memory.
越来越多的证据表明，短期记忆不仅存储最近经历刺激的身份，还存储关于它们呈现时间的信息。这种关于“何时发生了什么”的表示构成了最近过去的神经时间线。行为结果表明，人们可以按顺序访问最近的记忆，就好像它们沿着时间线存储，而注意力则按顺序指向这些记忆。在短期近因判断 (JOR) 任务中，在两个探测项目之间进行选择的时间取决于最近的探测项目的近因，但不取决于更远的探测项目的近因。这种结果模式表明存在向后自我终止搜索模型。我们回顾了来自猕猴外侧前额叶皮层 (lPFC) 的最近神经证据 (Tiganj、Cromer、Roy、Miller 和 Howard，即将发表) 和来自人类 JOR 任务的行为证据 (Singh 和 Howard，2017)，这些证据都支持了这个问题。值得注意的是，这两个证据都表明，时间线如韦伯-费希纳比例定律所预测的那样呈对数压缩。综上所述，这些发现为短期记忆的时间组织和神经基础提供了一个综合的视角。
