The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory: Relevance to CNTRICS and Schizophrenia

doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.03.003

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 July 2008, Pages 11-17

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.03.003 Get rights and content

Working memory is one of the central constructs in cognitive science and has received enormous attention in the theoretical and empirical literature. Similarly, working memory deficits have long been thought to be among the core cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, making it a ripe area for translation. This article provides a brief overview of the current theories and data on the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in working memory, which is a summary of the presentation and discussion on working memory that occurred at the first Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) meeting (Washington, D.C.). At this meeting, the consensus was that the constructs of goal maintenance and interference control were the most ready to be pursued as part of a translational cognitive neuroscience effort at future CNTRICS meetings. The constructs of long-term memory reactivation, capacity, and strategic encoding were felt to be of great clinical interest but requiring more basic research. In addition, the group felt that the constructs of maintenance over time and updating in working memory had growing construct validity at the psychological and neural levels but required more research in schizophrenia before these should be considered as targets for a clinical trials setting.

Section snippets

Cognitive Neuroscience Theories of Working Memory

Working memory is typically defined as the ability to maintain and manipulate information over short periods of time. There are a number of influential models of the processes involved in working memory. One such early model is Baddeley's (11), which distinguishes among four major components: 1) a short-term storage buffer for visual information that is often referred to as the visuospatial scratch pad, 2) a short-term storage buffer for verbal information referred to as the phonological loop

Clarity of the Understanding of the Cognitive Mechanism

As described earlier, Engle's theory of working memory emphasizes the centrality of the ability to maintain goals that delineate the type of information that is currently relevant for the contents of working memory (e.g., the focus of attention) as a means of selecting task-relevant information for inclusion in working memory and as a means to protect this information from interference from competing information (27, 28). The term goal in this context refers to a range of information, including

Constructs in Need of More Clinical Research

There were two constructs—rehearsal (active maintenance over time) and updating—that the conference participants felt had reasonable construct validity at the neural and psychological levels but needed more research to determine whether these mechanisms were impaired in schizophrenia. Maintenance over time has been well studied in the basic science literature. As described earlier, the phonological loop is thought to support rehearsal and maintenance of verbally coded information, whereas

Constructs in Need of More Basic Research

There were three constructs that the conference attendees felt were in need of greater basic research to establish psychological and neural construct validity before they were ready for use in a clinical trials context. The first construct was long-term memory reactivation, either in terms of the mechanism by which information is moved back into working memory or in terms of the idea that working memory is simply the activated component of long-term memory, as in Cowan's model (88). Although

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Spatial working memory in rats: Crucial role of the hippocampus in the allothetic place avoidance alternation task demanding stimuli segregation
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Working memory is a construct that contains goal maintenance, interference control and memory capacity domains. Spatial working memory in presence of conflicting stimuli requires segregation and maintenance of the relevant information about a goal over a short period of time. Besides the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus is an anatomical substrate for the working memory. We hypothesized that in a highly challenging task, where spatial stimuli are in a conflict and only some of them describe the goal location, the spatial working memory will be strongly dependant on the hippocampus. To verify this, we used an allothetic place avoidance alternation task (APAAT). Performance of this task demands a small number of entries and a long maximum time avoided between consecutive entries to the shock sector. These parameters reflected both domains of working memory. The experiment was conducted on hippocampal lesioned (HIPP n = 12) and sham-operated (CTRL n = 8) rats trained in four APAAT days, each consisting of four 5-minute stages: habituation, stage1 (st1) and stage2 (st2) of memory training, a 5-minute break followed by a retrieval test. The position of the shock sector was changed each day. The HIPP rats were impaired on both stages of memory training, whereas CTRL rats presented significant memory improvement on stage2. In HIPP rats the cognitive skill learning measured as shock per entrance ratio was compromised. Hippocampal lesions did not impair locomotor activity. In summary, even slight bilateral damage to the hippocampus is blocking working memory formation in a difficult task.
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Citation Excerpt :
These newly evolved circuits are critical for high-order cognition, executive functioning, top-downregulation of emotion and behavior, attention, and working memory (WM). PFC dysfunction is cardinal to many psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (Barch and Smith, 2008; Cannon et al., 2005), as well as to age-related cognitive decline and cognitive devastation in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (Bussière et al., 2003a, 2003b; Dumitriu et al., 2010). Evidence suggests that acetylcholine (ACh) has critical influence on PFC function with relevance to the etiology and treatment of cognitive disorders.
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ReviewThe Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory: Relevance to CNTRICS and Schizophrenia

Section snippets

Cognitive Neuroscience Theories of Working Memory

Clarity of the Understanding of the Cognitive Mechanism

Constructs in Need of More Clinical Research

Constructs in Need of More Basic Research

Psychiatry Res

J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry

Biol Psychiatry

Biol Psychiatry

Trend Cogn Sci

Brain Res Cogn Brain Res

Brain Res Rev

Cogn Psychol

Curr Opin Neurobiol

Neuropsychologia

Schizophr Res

Biol Psychiatry

Schizophr Res

Schizophr Res

J Psychiatr Res

Biol Psychiatry

Neuropsychologia

Neuroscience

Neuroimage

Schizophr Res

Schizophr Res

Trends Neurosci

Schizophr Res

Schizophr Res

Psychiatry Res

Schizophr Res

Int J Psychophysiol

Neuroscience

Biol Psychiatry

From cognitive to neural models of working memory

Philos Trans R Soc Lond Biol Sci

Schizophrenics show spatial working memory deficits

Arch Gen Psychiatry

Working memory impairments in schizophrenia: A meta-analysis

J Abnorm Psychol

The cognitive neuroscience of schizophrenia

A prospective study of childhood neurocognitive functioning in schizophrenic patients and their siblings

Am J Psychiatry

Cognitive and behavioral precursors of schizophrenia

Dev Psychopathol

Working Memory

A positron emission tomography study of the short-term maintenance of verbal information

J Neurosci

Dissociation of verbal working memory system components using a delayed serial recall task

Cereb Cortex

The phonological short-term store-rehearsal system: patterns of impairment and neural correlates

Neuropsychologia

Rehearsal in spatial working memory

J Exp Psychol

Maintenance of spatial and motor codes during oculomotor delayed response tasks

J Neurosci

Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain

Nat Rev Neurosci

The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions

Nature

Storage and executive processes in the frontal lobes

Science

Inhibition in verbal working memory revealed by brain activation

Proc Nat Acad Sci U S A

The neural substrate and temporal dynamics of interference effects in working memory as revealed by event-related functional MRI

Proc Nat Acad Sci U S A

Review
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory: Relevance to CNTRICS and Schizophrenia