Review
Psychology
Freek van Ede, Anna C. Nobre
Summary: Flexible behavior is guided by both immediate sensations and relevant mental contents carried by working memory. Selective attention functions in guiding behavior through the contents of working memory are just as important as those operating on sensory signals. This review focuses on selective attention inside working memory and demonstrates its functional, flexible, and future-oriented nature. Visual working memory is used as a model to discuss the purpose, targets, sources, and mechanisms of internal selective attention. The study of internal selective attention provides new insights into attention and working memory and contributes to an integrated understanding of mind and behavior.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Cell Biology
Macarena S. Arrazola, Matias Lira, Felipe Veliz-Valverde, Gabriel Quiroz, Somya Iqbal, Samantha L. Eaton, Douglas J. Lamont, Hernan Huerta, Gonzalo Ureta, Sebastian Bernales, J. Cesar Cardenas, Waldo Cerpa, Thomas M. Wishart, Felipe A. Court
Summary: Age is a major risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases, with axonal degeneration being an early event in the aged brain. This study found that inhibiting necroptosis, a form of cell death, delayed age-associated axonal degeneration and neuroinflammation, protecting against cognitive decline in mice. Inhibition of necroptosis also improved the hippocampal proteome and its associated functions, such as synaptic plasticity. These findings suggest that necroptosis plays a role in age-related brain degeneration and targeting it could be a potential strategy to treat memory impairment and cognitive decline.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Matthew F. Panichello, Timothy J. Buschman
Summary: Cognitive control guides behavior by controlling what, when, and how information is represented in the brain. Prefrontal cortex acts as a domain-general controller for both selection and attention, while parietal and visual cortex represent attention and selection independently. Selection and attention facilitate behavior by enhancing and transforming the representation of selected memory or attended stimulus.
Article
Clinical Neurology
R. Douglas Fields
Summary: Working memory is still a subject of debate in terms of its cellular mechanisms; Barbosa and colleagues' study challenges the idea proposed by Wolff and colleagues by suggesting that working memory is encoded by sustained action potential firing; while some studies indicate that unconscious working memories can be recalled even without measurable neural activity.
Review
Nutrition & Dietetics
Brian Hack, Eduardo Macedo Penna, Tyler Talik, Rohan Chandrashekhar, Mindy Millard-Stafford
Summary: A systematic review and meta-analysis found that acute ingestion of Guarana has a small positive effect on human cognitive performance, improving response time but not accuracy. Whether the changes in cognitive performance are related to the caffeine content or other bioactive substances in Guarana remains unknown and requires further research.
Review
Clinical Neurology
Priyanka D. Pinky, Jeremiah C. Pfitzer, Jared Senfeld, Hao Hong, Subhrajit Bhattacharya, Vishnu Suppiramaniam, Irfan Qureshi, Miranda N. Reed
Summary: This review examines how dysregulated glutamatergic mechanisms contribute to cognitive and behavioral impairments in Alzheimer's disease, and discusses potential therapeutic approaches to address these deficits. The authors focus on the pathological alterations of the tripartite synapse and highlight the development of novel glutamatergic drug candidates for treating AD.
Article
Neurosciences
Renee Chasse, Alexey Malyshev, Roslyn Holly Fitch, Maxim Volgushev
Summary: Theoretical and modeling studies suggest that heterosynaptic plasticity enhances discriminative learning and repetitive learning in Hebbian-type systems. Experimental manipulation of adenosine A1 receptors (A1Rs) to impair heterosynaptic plasticity resulted in impaired synaptic plasticity and deficits in visual discrimination learning in A1R KO mice. These results provide experimental evidence for the role of heterosynaptic plasticity in organism-level learning and suggest it as a potential target for interventions to enhance new learning.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Ying Zhou, Clayton E. Curtis, Kartik K. Sreenivasan, Daryl Fougnie
Summary: This study investigates the relationship between working memory and attention using fMRI and machine learning. The results demonstrate that selecting items in working memory and shifting attention utilize similar neural mechanisms. These shared mechanisms control the relative gains of neural populations and encode behaviorally relevant information.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Psychology
Tamara Gimenez-Fernandez, Francisco Vicente-Conesa, David Luque, Miguel A. Vadillo
Summary: In this experiment, the researchers investigated whether probabilistic cuing is influenced by visual, spatial, and spatiotemporal working memory load. Their findings partially supported the hypothesis that probabilistic cuing is not affected by a secondary task, but also revealed that working memory load could have an impact on the results, suggesting that it might be premature to rule out the possibility that attentional bias requires working memory resources.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Prathima A. A. Raghavendra, Shantala Hegde, Mariamma Philip, Muralidharan Kesavan
Summary: This study explored musical and neuro-cognitive deficits in patients with mild-moderate major depressive disorder (MDD). The results showed that these patients had significant deficits in working memory, verbal learning, and memory, but no differences in music cognition. The study also found a significant relationship between music cognition and attention.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Diana P. Benitez, Shenyi Jiang, Jack Wood, Rui Wang, Chloe M. Hall, Carlijn Peerboom, Natalie Wong, Katie M. Stringer, Karina S. Vitanova, Victoria C. Smith, Dhaval Joshi, Takashi Saito, Takaomi C. Saido, John Hardy, Jorg Hanrieder, Bart De Strooper, Dervis A. Salih, Takshashila Tripathi, Frances A. Edwards, Damian M. Cummings
Summary: The study found that microglial response to increased amyloid beta levels is delayed, with an increase in glutamate release probability observed in knock-in and transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer's disease. The findings suggest that alterations in surviving phagocytic microglia, rather than microglial loss, may play a role in age-dependent effects on glutamate release, which become exacerbated in Alzheimer's disease.
MOLECULAR NEURODEGENERATION
(2021)
Review
Neurosciences
Maria Balaet
Summary: Psychedelic compounds have the potential to revolutionize neuroscience and psychiatry. Current studies are limited in assessing the acute effects of psychedelics on cognition, and further research is needed to understand the impact of dosage on cognitive function.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Review
Psychology, Mathematical
Susan M. Ravizza, Katelyn M. Conn
Summary: This study discusses three ways in which information becomes automatically prioritized in working memory: physical salience, statistical learning, and reward learning. It integrates findings from perception and working memory studies to propose a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between attention and working memory.
PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Courtney Glavis-Bloom, Casey R. Vanderlip, John H. Reynolds
Summary: Research on aging marmosets has shown that aged animals exhibit delayed onset of learning, slowed learning rate after onset, and decreased asymptotic working memory performance, which are not accounted for by age-related impairments in motor speed and motivation.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Ya-Ting Chen, Freek van Ede, Bo-Cheng Kuo
Summary: This study investigates the neural basis of working memory capacity by exploiting the content dependence of memory materials. The results show that alpha oscillations track memory capacity in a content-specific manner, dependent not only on the number of items but also on their complexity.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)