@article{2413,
  keywords = {Animals, Acoustic Stimulation, Male, Cerebral Cortex, Memory, Short-Term, Movement, Orientation, Rats, Rats, Long-Evans, Superior Colliculi},
  author = {Charles Kopec and Jeffrey Erlich and Bingni Brunton and Karl Deisseroth and Carlos Brody},
  title = {Cortical and Subcortical Contributions to Short-Term Memory for Orienting Movements.},
  abstract = { <p>Neural activity in frontal cortical areas has been causally linked to short-term memory (STM), but whether this activity is necessary for forming, maintaining, or reading out STM remains unclear. In rats performing a memory-guided orienting task, the frontal orienting fields in cortex (FOF) are considered critical for STM maintenance, and during each trial display a monotonically increasing neural encoding for STM. Here, we transiently inactivated either the FOF or the superior colliculus and found that the resulting impairments in memory-guided orienting performance followed a monotonically decreasing time course, surprisingly opposite to the neural encoding. A dynamical attractor model in which STM relies equally on cortical and subcortical regions reconciled the encoding and inactivation data. We confirmed key predictions of the model, including a time-dependent relationship between trial difficulty and perturbability, and substantial, supralinear, impairment following simultaneous inactivation of the FOF and superior colliculus during memory maintenance.</p> },
  year = {2015},
  journal = {Neuron},
  volume = {88},
  pages = {367-77},
  month = {2015 Oct 21},
  issn = {1097-4199},
  doi = {10.1016/j.neuron.2015.08.033},
  language = {eng},
}