Christos Constantinidis, Wake Forest School of Medicine

Neurophysiological mechanisms of working memory

Executive functions mature late in life, in adolescence or early adulthood, and may be enhanced even in adulthood through cognitive training. Little is known about how the activity of the prefrontal cortex is modified so as to mediate such cognitive changes. To address this question, my laboratory has performed a series of experiments recording activity in adolescent and adult monkeys, as well as before and after training on working memory tasks. Comparing neural activity between adolescent and adult animals revealed unchanged representation of visual stimuli, increased activation during working memory, but decreased representation of distracting stimuli. After task training in adult monkeys, more prefrontal neurons were activated by the stimuli, and increased activity was present during working memory maintenance. These results reveal the nature of changes in neural activity that underlie cognitive enhancement in development and as a result of task training.

Additional Information

Colloquium of the GRK " Sensory Computation in Neural Systems"

Organized by

Lisa Velenosi / Felix Blankenburg