Neural mechanisms of expert skills in visual working memory.

Full Abstract

Expertise can increase working memory (WM) performance, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms of these improvements remain unclear. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the degree to which expertise acquisition is supported by tuning of occipitotemporal object representations and tuning of prefrontal and parietal networks that may support domain-specific WM skills. We trained subjects to become experts in a novel category of complex visual objects and examined brain activity while they performed a WM task with objects from the expert category and from an untrained category. Visual expertise training resulted in improved recognition of expert, compared with untrained objects, and this effect was eliminated in a behavioral experiment by stimulus inversion. These behavioral changes were accompanied by increased recruitment of bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal, posterior parietal, and occipitotemporal cortices during WM encoding and maintenance. Across subjects, behavioral measures of expertise reliably predicted increased activation during maintenance of expert objects in all three regions. These neural expertise effects could not be attributed to differences in low-level stimulus characteristics between the two categories, familiarity with features of expert-domain objects, or familiarity with the WM task. These results are consistent with the idea that visual expertise improves WM performance through tuning of occipitotemporal object representations and through development of lateral prefrontal and posterior parietal networks that mediate the application of domain-specific mnemonic skills.

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Author information

Author/s: Moore, Christopher D (CD); Cohen, Michael X (MX); Ranganath, Charan (C);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Princeton University, New Jersey 08540, USA. cdm(-atsign-)princeton.edu

Grants: P01 NS40813 (Agency:NINDS NIH HHS) ; R01 MH067821 (Agency:NIMH NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience (J Neurosci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Oct; vol 26 (issue 43) : pp 11187-96

Dates: Created 2006/10/26; Completed 2006/11/24; Revised 2007/12/03;

PMID: 17065458, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Brain Mapping - methods
Female
Humans
Learning - physiology
Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods
Male

Male
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
Nerve Net - physiology
Photic Stimulation - methods
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reaction Time - physiology

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