Manipulation Facilitates Working Memory Generalization in Human Parietal and Frontal Cortices
Poster No:
871
Submission Type:
Late-Breaking Abstract Submission
Authors:
Dongping Shi1,2, Qing Yu1
Institutions:
1Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
First Author:
Dongping Shi
Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shanghai, China|Beijing, China
Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shanghai, China|Beijing, China
Co-Author:
Qing Yu
Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shanghai, China
Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shanghai, China
Introduction:
Working memory, the ability to flexibly maintain and manipulate information to guide behavior, is fundamental to human higher intelligence. It has been argued that working memory is highly constructive, wherein mnemonic information is abstracted through shared perceptual or structural knowledge to facilitate efficiency and learning(Kwak & Curtis, 2022; Luettgau et al., 2024). However, experimental evidence supporting this idea remains limited. In this study, we addressed this problem by investigating how stimulus structural information generalizes within working memory.
Methods:
We conducted two experiments and collected functional MRI (fMRI) data from human participants. In the first experiment, participants (N=23) completed a working memory task involving two distinct circular stimulus spaces (Figure 1A): location and object (Li, Liang, Lee, & Barense, 2020). In the location task, participants mentally maintained or manipulated spatial locations by a cued angle (rotating 0, ±60, ±120, ±180 degrees). In the object task, participants first acquired the structure of a circular object space by learning the transitional relations between objects drawn from the space, and during the main task, mentally maintained or manipulated objects according to symbolic cues indicating the stepwise distances to be updated (0, ±1, ±2, ±3 steps). The second experiment followed the same design as the first, with participants (N=22) being asked to form a fixed one-to-one mapping between location and object stimuli through behavioral training.
Support vector machine (SVM) analysis was used to decode stimulus representations for each task separately, and principal component analysis (PCA) and cross-decoding analysis were applied to determine whether there was a generalized code for each condition.
Support vector machine (SVM) analysis was used to decode stimulus representations for each task separately, and principal component analysis (PCA) and cross-decoding analysis were applied to determine whether there was a generalized code for each condition.
Results:
In the first experiment, we observed that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) exhibited persistent stimulus representation for both cued and rotated information in both tasks (Figure 1B). In contrast, the early visual cortex (EVC) showed weaker or even insignificant representation in the object task. These results indicate that PPC serves as a domain-general brain region for working memory manipulation. Then, we applied PCA to decompose neural activity in the PPC into three subspaces: one shared by both tasks and two unique to each task. We found that the neural representation of the cued stimulus in the manipulation condition was stronger in the shared subspace compared to the maintenance condition (Figure 2A). This suggests that the generalization of mnemonic information in PPC is enhanced when the information is actively being manipulated.
In the second experiment, we used cross-decoding analysis and again revealed higher cross-decoding performance of PPC for the cued stimulus in the manipulation condition, reaffirming that mnemonic generalization is facilitated through manipulation, even when the two stimulus spaces were explicitly linked (Figure 2B). Similar patterns of generalization were observed in the superior precentral sulcus (sPCS).
In the second experiment, we used cross-decoding analysis and again revealed higher cross-decoding performance of PPC for the cued stimulus in the manipulation condition, reaffirming that mnemonic generalization is facilitated through manipulation, even when the two stimulus spaces were explicitly linked (Figure 2B). Similar patterns of generalization were observed in the superior precentral sulcus (sPCS).
Conclusions:
Our results demonstrate that the human parietal and frontal cortices play a domain-general role in representing and generalizing mnemonic information during working memory manipulation.
Learning and Memory:
Working Memory 1
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Multivariate Approaches 2
Novel Imaging Acquisition Methods:
BOLD fMRI
Keywords:
Memory
MRI
Multivariate
Other - working memory manipulation; generalization
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Provide references using APA citation style.
Li, A. Y., Liang, J. C., Lee, A. C., & Barense, M. D. (2020). The validated circular shape space: Quantifying the visual similarity of shape. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(5), 949.
Luettgau, L., Erdmann, T., Veselic, S., Stachenfeld, K. L., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Moran, R., & Dolan, R. J. (2024). Decomposing dynamical subprocesses for compositional generalization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(46), e2408134121.