https://postlab.psych.wisc.edu/files/9813/7667/7644/postle_2006_neurosci.pdf

Working Memory as an Emergent Property of the Mind and Brain

Sensory working memory consists of the short-term storage of sensory stimuli to guide behaviour. There is increasing evidence that elemental sensory dimensions — such as object motion in the visual system or the frequency of a sound in the auditory system — are stored by segregated feature-selective systems that include not only the prefrontal and parietal cortex, but also areas of sensory cortex that carry out relatively early stages of processing. These circuits seem to have a dual function: precise sensory encoding and short-term storage of this information. New results provide insights into how activity in these circuits represents the remembered sensory stimuli.

/pdf/working-memory-in-primate-sensory-systems-24sryr95pk.pdf

Working memory in primate sensory systems

Objective To study the associations between sleep quality/quantity and performance in auditory/visual working memory tasks of different load levels. Method Sixty schoolchildren aged 6 to 13 years from normal school classes voluntarily participated. Actigraphy measurement was done during a typical school week for 72 consecutive hours. It was timed together with the working memory experiments to obtain information on children's sleep during that period. The n-back task paradigm was used to examine auditory and visual working memory functions. Results Lower sleep efficiency and longer sleep latency were associated with a higher percentage of incorrect responses in working memory tasks at all memory load levels (partial correlations, controlling for age, all p values p F = 11.706, p = .050) and latency ( F = 3.588, p = .034) were significantly associated with the mean incorrect response rate in auditory working memory tasks. Conclusions Sleep quality and quantity affect performance of working memory tasks in school-age children. In children with learning difficulties the possibility of underlying sleep problems should be excluded.

Working memory and sleep in 6- to 13-year-old schoolchildren.

https://teensneedsleep.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/sleep-and-memory-in-healthy-children-and-adolescents-a-critical-review.pdf

Sleep and memory in healthy children and adolescents – A critical review

Nature Rev. Neurosci. 6, 97–107 (2005) Reference 18 in this article was omitted. This reference is Pasternak, T. & Zaksas, D. Stimulus specificity and temporal dynamics of working memory for visual motion. J. Neurophysiol. 90, 2752–2757 (2003). Also in this article, in the sentence “Sekuler and colleagues used a different approach to examine the nature of stimulus representation in memory22,23” we should not have referred to reference 23, but to a reference that was omitted.

/pdf/erratum-working-memory-in-primate-sensory-systems-1rve4of5tz.pdf

Erratum: Working memory in primate sensory systems

Effects of interfering task-irrelevant tones varying in location or pitch on auditory location and pitch n-back tasks were investigated to study whether there is segregation of spatial and non-spatial information processing in the auditory working memory. The subjects performed spatial and non-spatial auditory 1- and 2-back tasks with and without location or pitch interference. In the 1-back tasks, location but not pitch interference significantly impaired location task performance whereas pitch but not location interference disrupted pitch task performance. In the 2-back tasks, neither the location nor the pitch task performance was differentially disrupted by the distractors, suggesting that there is memory load-dependent segregation in the handling of location and pitch information in the neuronal networks engaged in auditory working memory.

Jaakko Kahnari

Papers

Selective interference reveals dissociation between auditory memory for location and pitch.