Preparation visit for a Human Frontiers proposal writing

The main aim of the visit is to prepare a draft for a Human Frontiers research proposal. The research proposal will explore the features and limitations of different neuronal coding mechanisms that may underlie short-term memory. There are two coding strategies which were suggested to underlie this form of memory. It can be encoded in the firing rate of neurons without temporal correlations among the spiking activity, or it can be encoded in the phase of the neuronal activity with respect to a reference oscillation. Early models of short-term memory consider reverberating, asynchroneous activity forming multiple neuronal attractor states (Amit, 1989). Memory items encoded at different phases within cycles of a roughly 7 Hz oscillation have been suggested by Lysman and Idiart (1995). The envisaged proposal will reconsider these two options by re-analysing data from Buschman and Miller (2009, 2011, in press). Simple preliminary models will be used to prepare a list of the strengths and the weaknesses of the alternative short-term memory models. They will be used to generate preliminary sets of predictions that could be tested in new experiments. This will allow us to identify the theoretical and experimental scientific partners for the Human Frontiers grant proposal and for future collaborations.