NEURONEX WORKING MEMORY CONSORTIUM

Our international consortium is composed of four teams, spanning from integrated behavior, to genomics, to computational modeling. We are working to test predictions from mathematical models about mental representations in cutting-edge experiments... Mental representations, liberated from sensory experience and motor actions, are the foundation of abstract thought. The ability to use mental representations to guide behavior is probed in working memory tasks, in which information must be remembered for several seconds to guide a subsequent behavioral response. How did these representations arise during evolution of the brain? This is a question of paramount importance to our understanding of the brain and cognition. Our international team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Germany is working to understand this question from the genetic code for single ion channels to the networks of millions of neurons that underlie working memory in the brain.