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Strategic resource allocation in the human brain supports cognitive coordination of object and spatial working memory

Jackson, Margaret C., Morgan, Helen M., Shapiro, Kimron L., Mohr, Harald and Linden, David Edmund Johannes. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5638-9292 2011. Strategic resource allocation in the human brain supports cognitive coordination of object and spatial working memory. American Journal of Psychiatry 32 (8) , pp. 1330-1348. 10.1002/hbm.21112

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Abstract

The ability to integrate different types of information (e.g., object identity and spatial orientation) and maintain or manipulate them concurrently in working memory (WM) facilitates the flow of ongoing tasks and is essential for normal human cognition. Research shows that object and spatial information is maintained and manipulated in WM via separate pathways in the brain (object/ventral versus spatial/dorsal). How does the human brain coordinate the activity of different specialized systems to conjoin different types of information? Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate conjunction- versus single-task manipulation of object (compute average color blend) and spatial (compute intermediate angle) information in WM. Object WM was associated with ventral (inferior frontal gyrus, occipital cortex), and spatial WM with dorsal (parietal cortex, superior frontal, and temporal sulci) regions. Conjoined object/spatial WM resulted in intermediate activity in these specialized areas, but greater activity in different prefrontal and parietal areas. Unique to our study, we found lower temporo-occipital activity and greater deactivation in temporal and medial prefrontal cortices for conjunction- versus single-tasks. Using structural equation modeling, we derived a conjunction-task connectivity model that comprises a frontoparietal network with a bidirectional DLPFC-VLPFC connection, and a direct parietal-extrastriate pathway. We suggest that these activation/deactivation patterns reflect efficient resource allocation throughout the brain and propose a new extended version of the biased competition model of WM.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Medicine
Psychology
MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG)
Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI)
Subjects: R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Uncontrolled Keywords: Working memory ; Conjunction ; Visuospatial ; fMRI ; SEM
Publisher: Wiley
ISSN: 1065-9471
Last Modified: 19 Oct 2022 09:58
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/22811

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