Dake Mrugank, Curtis Clayton E
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Mar 18;16(1):2675. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-57882-8.
Decades of macaque research established the importance of prefrontal cortex for working memory. Surprisingly, recent human neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the contents of working memory can be decoded from primary visual cortex (V1). However the necessity of this mnemonic information remains unknown and contentious. Here we provide causal evidence that transcranial magnetic stimulation targeting human V1 disrupted the fidelity of visual working memory. Errors increased only for targets remembered in the portion of the visual field disrupted by stimulation. Moreover, concurrently measured electroencephalography confirmed that stimulation disrupted not only memory behavior, but neurophysiological signatures of working memory. These results change the question from whether visual cortex is necessary for working memory to what mechanisms it uses to support memory. Moreover, they point to models in which the mechanisms supporting working memory are distributed across brain regions, including sensory areas that here we show are critical for memory storage.
数十年的猕猴研究确立了前额叶皮质对工作记忆的重要性。令人惊讶的是，最近的人类神经影像学研究表明，工作记忆的内容可以从初级视觉皮层（V1）解码出来。然而，这种记忆信息的必要性仍然未知且存在争议。在这里，我们提供了因果证据，表明针对人类V1的经颅磁刺激会破坏视觉工作记忆的保真度。仅在受刺激干扰的视野部分中记忆的目标的错误增加。此外，同时测量的脑电图证实，刺激不仅破坏了记忆行为，还破坏了工作记忆的神经生理特征。这些结果将问题从视觉皮层对工作记忆是否必要转变为它使用什么机制来支持记忆。此外，它们指向了这样的模型，即支持工作记忆的机制分布在大脑区域，包括我们在此表明对记忆存储至关重要的感觉区域。
