Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation, 620000.
Sci Rep. 2020 Sep 30;10(1):16090. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-72940-5.
Working memory (WM) consists of short-term storage and executive components. We studied cortical oscillatory correlates of these two components in a large sample of 156 participants to assess separately the contribution of them to individual differences in WM. The participants were presented with WM tasks of above-average complexity. Some of the tasks required only storage in WM, others required storage and mental manipulations. Our data indicate a close relationship between frontal midline theta, central beta activity and the executive components of WM. The oscillatory counterparts of the executive components were associated with individual differences in verbal WM performance. In contrast, alpha activity was not related to the individual differences. The results demonstrate that executive components of WM, rather than short-term storage capacity, play the decisive role in individual WM capacity limits.
工作记忆(WM)由短期存储和执行组件组成。我们在一个由 156 名参与者组成的大样本中研究了这两个组件的皮质振荡相关物,以分别评估它们对 WM 个体差异的贡献。参与者被呈现出具有平均以上复杂度的 WM 任务。有些任务只需要在 WM 中存储,而有些任务则需要存储和心理操作。我们的数据表明,额中线 theta 和中央 beta 活动与 WM 的执行组件密切相关。执行组件的振荡对应物与言语 WM 表现的个体差异有关。相比之下,alpha 活动与个体差异无关。结果表明,WM 的执行组件而不是短期存储容量在个体 WM 能力限制中起着决定性作用。