How the brain mentally sorts a series of items in a specific order within working memory (WM) remains largely unknown. We investigated mental sorting using high-throughput electrophysiological recordings in the frontal cortex of macaque monkeys, who memorized and sorted spatial sequences in forward or backward orders according to visual cues. We discovered that items at each ordinal rank in WM were encoded in separate rank-WM subspaces and then, depending on cues, were maintained or reordered between the subspaces, accompanied by two extra temporary subspaces in two operation steps. Furthermore, the cue activity served as an indexical signal to trigger sorting processes. Thus, we propose a complete conceptual framework, where the neural landscape transitions in frontal neural states underlie the symbolic system for mental programming of sequence WM.

中文翻译：

---

猕猴额叶皮层工作记忆中空间序列的心理编程


大脑如何在工作记忆 （WM） 中按特定顺序对一系列项目进行心理排序在很大程度上仍然未知。我们使用猕猴额叶皮层中的高通量电生理记录研究了心理排序，它们根据视觉线索以向前或向后的顺序记忆和排序空间序列。我们发现 WM 中每个序数等级的项目都被编码在单独的等级 WM 子空间中，然后根据线索，在子空间之间保持或重新排序，并在两个操作步骤中伴随着两个额外的临时子空间。此外，cue 活动还充当触发排序过程的索引信号。因此，我们提出了一个完整的概念框架，其中额叶神经状态的神经景观过渡是序列 WM 心理编程的符号系统的基础。