It seems to be a tenet of ordinary common sense that people remember what they attend to and forget what they do not. Not surprisingly, researchers have noted the very close relationship between attention and memory for a very long time, and some...

The brain consists of a vast number of individual cells called neurons. Individual neurons form highly complex patterns of interconnections with many other neurons. Each of these connections is called a synapse and a collection of interconnected...

A primate needs its prefrontal cortex for behavior based on information accumulated before the moment of action. The prefrontal cortex is especially important if the information is new to the organism or conflicts with prior cues or memories that call...

A widely accepted theory regarding the function of the brain's prefrontal cortex is that it serves as a store of short-term memory. This idea was first formulated by Jacobsen, who reported in 1935 that damage to the primate prefrontal cortex caused...

Single-unit, event-related potential (ERP), and neuroimaging studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in top-down control of attention and working memory. We conducted an experiment in patients with unilateral PFC damage (n = 8) to assess the temporal kinetics of PFC-extrastriate interactions during visual...

Mediating proactive interference (PI), the deleterious effect of antecedent information on current memory representations, is believed to be a key function of prefrontal cortex (PFC). Item-specific PI results when an invalid probe matches a memorandum from the preceding trial; item-nonspecific PI is produced by...