"Did you just ask me what questions are coming?" "Well, when I think about it, hehe..." After ten minutes, I still couldn't come up with an answer. That might be related to your short-term memory—also known as working memory. Recently, researchers from the Key Laboratory of Primate Neurobiology at the Institute of Life Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, published a study titled *Medial prefrontal activity during delay period contributes to learning of a working memory task*. The research highlights the role of the medial prefrontal cortex during the delay phase of working memory, offering new insights into how we process and retain information.
Working memory is a limited-capacity system that temporarily stores and manipulates information, playing a key role in complex cognitive tasks. It was once called short-term memory (STM), but in 1974, Baddeley and Hitch introduced the concept of working memory based on experiments involving obstacles. They proposed a three-component model that emphasized the connection between memory and ongoing tasks. This type of memory helps us perform daily activities like solving math problems or remembering a phone number for a short time.
A key feature of working memory is the "delay period," during which information is temporarily held before it's used. Scientists have observed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during this time, but its exact role remained unclear.
To investigate further, researchers designed an experiment where mice performed a new working memory task involving olfactory matching. They manipulated the activity of neurons in the mPFC during the delay period. Initially, the mice struggled to complete the task when neural activity was suppressed. However, after training, the same manipulation no longer affected their performance.
This suggests that the brain adapts over time, and the delay period in the mPFC becomes crucial for retaining information during new tasks. Earlier studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex, including the medial region, is involved in social cognition, emotional processing, decision-making, and self-awareness. This new research deepens our understanding of how these brain areas support working memory and learning.
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