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Working memory improves during adolescent brain development. Zhu et al. tracked monkeys through adolescence, revealing that maturation of white matter tracts and refinement of neural firing patterns sharpen working memory precision.

It remains unclear whether improvements in one cognitive task transfer to other tasks. Here, the authors show that changes in prefrontal neuronal activation, firing rate, and local field potentials induced during active learning of a working memory task are also evident in a control task.

How the acquisition of a cognitive task may alter stimulus representation geometry is not fully understood. Here, the authors show that transformations are present even prior to task training, performed automatically by prefrontal circuits.

Working memory (WM) — the ability to maintain and manipulate information over a period of seconds — is a key cognitive skill. Constantinidis and Klingberg discuss non-human-primate, computational-modelling and human-neuroimaging studies that examine the neural bases of WM and training-induced enhancements of WM capacity.

The prefrontal cortex is critical for working memory, over a timescale of seconds. In this Review, Miller and Constantinidis examine how the prefrontal cortex facilitates the integration of memory systems across other timescales as well. In this framework of prefrontal learning, short-term memory and long-term memory interact to serve goal-directed behaviour.

Barbosa, Stein et al. show that rather than operating independently, PFC persistent activity and ‘activity-silent’ mechanisms interact dynamically to produce serial effects in working memory, consistent with attractor models with synaptic plasticity.

Identifying causal interactions between brain regions is important to understand its computations. Here the authors present optoMEG, a platform for combining optogenetic techniques with high-resolution magnetic source imaging in nonhuman primates to map network activation.

The authors found that, when monkeys detected a salient stimulus defined purely by bottom-up factors, neurons in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex represented the stimulus no later than those in the posterior parietal cortex. The results suggest an early involvement of the prefrontal cortex in the bottom-up guidance of visual attention.

Working memory is known to improve through adolescence into adulthood, yet the associated changes in neuronal activity are not well understood. Zhou and colleagues report increased delay period activity correlated with changes in performance on working memory tasks in monkeys as they transition into adulthood.

Studies of the functional organization of the prefrontal cortex have produced contradicting results depending on the task used. Here, Riley and colleagues demonstrate that prefrontal areas are specialized across the anterior posterior axis and that the effects of the task themselves impact more the anterior areas.

The authors use monkey electrophysiology data to test a “bump attractor” computational model. Their findings reinforce persistent activity as a basis for spatial working memory, provide evidence for a continuous prefrontal representation of memorized space, and offer experimental support for bump attractor dynamics mediating cognitive tasks in the cortex.

Neural variability and phase-locking analyses reveal that both working memory-sustained and working memory-selective neurons in the macaque prefrontal cortex contribute to spatial working memory performance.

Differential modulation of cell classes in monkey PFC reveals functional heterogeneity and highlights distinct contributions of neuronal subtypes to spatial and feature working memory, advancing insights into prefrontal cognitive circuits.

Electrophysiological recordings in male rhesus monkeys shows that neuronal selectivity for stimulus information determines prefrontal LFP gamma power regardless of task execution