Working Memory

Working memory is a capability that animals and people use to store information over a period of seconds or minutes, so that the information can be used, on the spot, to perform an action or make a decision. At the bedside, a neurologist might ask a patient to repeat a novel sentence. In days gone by, a person might take a telephone number from a phone book and use it to dial the telephone without looking at the printed number. Later, that person will probably forget the number. Working memory is experimentally studied in people with psychological tests and simultaneous measurements of neuronal activity using tools such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), EEG (electroencephalography), and MEG (magnetoencephalography): what parts of the brain become activated, and does working memory have detectable and interesting physical correlates? [Interestingly, working memory in human volunteers is improved with cholinergic enhancement (Furey et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 94:6512–6516, 1997), a pharmacological mechanism important in attention and in other specific cognitive tasks (Sarter and Lustig, Curr Opin Psychol 29:102–107, 2019) – see Chap. 11 on neocortical delta waves.]