Category: Uncategorized
-
Dopamine can make our working memory more or less flexible
Dopamine drugs are used to treat Parkinson’s disease, and alter a wide range of brain functions. One role of dopamine might be to make information we are currently holding in mind more stable — we are less likely to get distracted. We showed that this effect is crucially dependent on our initial memory capacity. People…
-
Neural model of working memory
Is it possible to account for our patterns of short-term remembering and forgetting, and at the same time, make predictions about what the corresponding neural activity should look like? That is what we tried to do in a recent paper. Our model suggests that neurons in the prefrontal cortex are critical for storing information in…
-
Why does it feel effortful to be precise?
Our eye movements are controlled by a relatively simple circuit in the brainstem. Remarkably, it seems to operate with less error when we are motivated by money. We showed that internal feedback gain — a process that stabilises motor plans as they are executed — increases with reward, thus improving the precision of the movement.…