Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Nat Neurosci. 2019 Mar;22(3):477-483. doi: 10.1038/s41593-018-0335-6. Epub 2019 Feb 4.
Visual working memory enables us to hold onto past sensations in anticipation that these may become relevant for guiding future actions. Yet laboratory tasks have treated visual working memories in isolation from their prospective actions and have focused on the mechanisms of memory retention rather than utilization. To understand how visual memories become used for action, we linked individual memory items to particular actions and independently tracked the neural dynamics of visual and motor selection when memories became used for action. This revealed concurrent visual-motor selection, engaging appropriate visual and motor brain areas at the same time. Thus we show that items in visual working memory can invoke multiple, item-specific, action plans that can be accessed together with the visual representations that guide them, affording fast and precise memory-guided behavior.
视觉工作记忆使我们能够记住过去的感觉，以便这些感觉可能对指导未来的行动有帮助。然而，实验室任务将视觉工作记忆与其预期的动作隔离开来，并且专注于记忆保留的机制，而不是利用。为了了解视觉记忆如何用于行动，我们将单个记忆项与特定的动作联系起来，并在记忆用于行动时独立跟踪视觉和运动选择的神经动力学。这揭示了同时的视觉-运动选择，同时涉及到适当的视觉和运动脑区。因此，我们表明，视觉工作记忆中的项目可以调用多个、特定于项目的动作计划，这些计划可以与指导它们的视觉表示一起访问，从而实现快速而精确的记忆引导行为。
