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The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information

Working memory (WM) is a buffer that temporarily maintains information, be it visual or auditory, in an active state, caching its contents for online rehearsal or manipulation. How the brain enables long-term semantic knowledge to affect the WM buffer is a theoretically significant issue awaiting fu...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chiou, Rocco, Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Academic Press 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5864511/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29289617
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.085
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author Chiou, Rocco
Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.
author_facet Chiou, Rocco
Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.
author_sort Chiou, Rocco
collection PubMed
description Working memory (WM) is a buffer that temporarily maintains information, be it visual or auditory, in an active state, caching its contents for online rehearsal or manipulation. How the brain enables long-term semantic knowledge to affect the WM buffer is a theoretically significant issue awaiting further investigation. In the present study, we capitalise on the knowledge about famous individuals as a ‘test-case’ to study how it impinges upon WM capacity for human faces and its neural substrate. Using continuous theta-burst transcranial stimulation combined with a psychophysical task probing WM storage for varying contents, we provide compelling evidence that (1) faces (regardless of familiarity) continued to accrue in the WM buffer with longer encoding time, whereas for meaningless stimuli (colour shades) there was little increment; (2) the rate of WM accrual was significantly more efficient for famous faces, compared to unknown faces; (3) the right anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe (ATL) causally mediated this superior WM storage for famous faces. Specifically, disrupting the ATL (a region tuned to semantic knowledge including person identity) selectively hinders WM accrual for celebrity faces while leaving the accrual for unfamiliar faces intact. Further, this ‘semantically-accelerated’ storage is impervious to disruption of the right middle frontal gyrus and vertex, supporting the specific and causative contribution of the right ATL. Our finding advances the understanding of the neural architecture of WM, demonstrating that it depends on interaction with long-term semantic knowledge underpinned by the ATL, which causally expands the WM buffer when visual content carries semantic information.
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spelling pubmed-58645112018-04-01 The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information Chiou, Rocco Lambon Ralph, Matthew A. Neuroimage Article Working memory (WM) is a buffer that temporarily maintains information, be it visual or auditory, in an active state, caching its contents for online rehearsal or manipulation. How the brain enables long-term semantic knowledge to affect the WM buffer is a theoretically significant issue awaiting further investigation. In the present study, we capitalise on the knowledge about famous individuals as a ‘test-case’ to study how it impinges upon WM capacity for human faces and its neural substrate. Using continuous theta-burst transcranial stimulation combined with a psychophysical task probing WM storage for varying contents, we provide compelling evidence that (1) faces (regardless of familiarity) continued to accrue in the WM buffer with longer encoding time, whereas for meaningless stimuli (colour shades) there was little increment; (2) the rate of WM accrual was significantly more efficient for famous faces, compared to unknown faces; (3) the right anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe (ATL) causally mediated this superior WM storage for famous faces. Specifically, disrupting the ATL (a region tuned to semantic knowledge including person identity) selectively hinders WM accrual for celebrity faces while leaving the accrual for unfamiliar faces intact. Further, this ‘semantically-accelerated’ storage is impervious to disruption of the right middle frontal gyrus and vertex, supporting the specific and causative contribution of the right ATL. Our finding advances the understanding of the neural architecture of WM, demonstrating that it depends on interaction with long-term semantic knowledge underpinned by the ATL, which causally expands the WM buffer when visual content carries semantic information. Academic Press 2018-04-01 /pmc/articles/PMC5864511/ /pubmed/29289617 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.085 Text en © 2018 The Authors http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Chiou, Rocco
Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.
The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
title The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
title_full The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
title_fullStr The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
title_full_unstemmed The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
title_short The anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
title_sort anterior-ventrolateral temporal lobe contributes to boosting visual working memory capacity for items carrying semantic information
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5864511/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29289617
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.085
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