ABSTRACT

In her recent Opinion, Xu argues that visual cortex is non-essential for visual working memory (WM) storage. In our response, we highlight some inconsistencies that undermine Xu’s claims and strengthen the notion that visual regions play a critical role in visual WM. Moreover, we contend that this framing of the debate ignores the larger point that WM storage is unlikely to be the purview of any single brain region. We outline a perspective that we term the “distributed systems view,” which considers WM – and storage in particular – to be distributed across multiple brain regions. This view is bolstered by evidence that a wide array of regions throughout the brain are involved in WM. Viewed in this light, the focus shifts from asking which regions are essential for WM and towards questions about how representations stored within each region complement one another, how they interact, and how they contribute to behaviour.

摘要

在她最近的意见中，徐认为视觉皮层对于视觉工作记忆 (WM) 存储不是必需的。在我们的回应中，我们强调了一些不一致的地方，这些不一致会破坏徐的主张，并加强了视觉区域在视觉 WM 中发挥关键作用的观念。此外，我们认为辩论的这种框架忽略了更重要的一点，即 WM 存储不太可能是任何单个大脑区域的权限。我们概述了一个我们称之为“分布式系统视图”的观点，它认为 WM——尤其是存储——分布在多个大脑区域。这一观点得到了证据的支持，即整个大脑的广泛区域都参与了 WM。从这个角度来看，焦点从询问哪些区域是必不可少的 对于 WM 以及关于存储在每个区域中的表示如何相互补充、它们如何相互作用以及它们如何对行为做出贡献的问题。