Short-term retention of information from an emergent-processes perspective

Postle (2006) proposed that working memory is an emergent property of the mind and the brain. That short-term retention of information is produced when attention is directed to neural areas that represented the particular type(s) of information. These neural areas are the very regions responsible for representing the same information in non-working memory situations, perception included. This view inadvertently includes the idea that information retained in working memory can comprise activated long-term memory. The present paper applied this view of working memory to the interpretation of short-term processing of information in a delay task, in which choices were made conditionally based on the presenting discriminative/cue stimulus-conditional discrimination choice task. Adult humans performed conditional discriminative choices under differing outcome delivery procedures while event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected. Over the memory delay, retrospective processing of the just perceived cue stimulus may be more resource demanding. Making the transition from retrospective processing to prospective processing of the anticipated choice and/or expected choice outcome taps into long-term (associative) memory and may thus help to reduce cognitive load. Interestingly, the functional neuroimaging data indicated that delay period prospective processing of an anticipated choice response relies more on the multiple-demand brain network, whereas prospection of an expected cue-unique choice outcome relies more on the default brain network. These results have implications for the interpretation of short-term activation and processing of information, and its relation (or not) to the explicit direction of attention