Rehearsing Weakly Attended Events are Prioritized for Better Memory

[annajafarpour]

Material below summarizes the article, Working Memory Replay Prioritizes Weakly Attended Events, published on August 14, 2017, in eNeuro and authored by Anna Jafarpour, Will Penny, Gareth Barnes, Robert T. Knight, and Emrah Duzel.

Working memory is a system with limited capacity that supports keeping information in mind for a short duration.

Two important questions are: One, what are the mechanisms by which information is retained during the gap between encoding and recall (that is, the maintenance period), and two, how is information within working memory prioritized?

These are often studied with a cuing procedure in which subjects are prompted to focus on one item. For example, if an event in a sequence of three events is cued, the cued event can be decoded during maintenance.

In this study, we investigated how the information about a sequence of multiple events is retained without cueing.

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