Topic: serial dependence

One elementary brain function that underlies many of our cognitive behaviors is the ability to maintain parametric information briefly in mind, in the time scale of seconds, to span delays between sensory information and actions. This component of working memory is fragile and quickly degrades with delay length. Under the assumption that behavioral delay-dependencies mark core functions of the working memory system, our goal is to find a neural circuit model that represents their neural mechanisms and apply it to research on working memory deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders. We have constr

Perception and action are biased by our recent experiences. Even when a sequence of stimuli are randomly presented, responses are sometimes attracted toward the past. The mechanism of such bias, recently termed serial dependence, is still under investigation. Currently, there is mixed evidence indicating that such bias could be either from a sensory and perceptual origin or occurring only at decisional stages. In this talk, I will present recent findings from our group showing that biases are decreased when disrupting the memory trace in a premotor region in a simple visuomotor task. In additi

Working memory (WM) content is mostly stored in neurons preferring contralateral cues in bilateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) [2], but can travel between hemispheres [3]. This is thought to support full-field spatial WM continuity. Recently, temporal continuity in WM has been linked to activity-silent mechanisms in PFC supporting behavioral serial dependence (SD) between successive trials [1]. Moreover, SD increases when prefrontal activity-silent traces of previous memories are reactivated in the fixation period by either internal or external (e.g. transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS) inputs

Perception can be strongly serially-dependent (i.e. biased toward previously seen stimuli). Recently, serial dependencies in perception were proposed as a mechanism for perceptual stability, increasing the apparent continuity of the complex environments we experience in everyday life. For example, stable scene perception can be actively achieved by the visual system through global serial dependencies, a special kind of serial dependence between summary statistical representations. Serial dependence occurs also between emotional expressions, but it is highly selective for the same identity. Ov