Professional or Amateur? The Phonological Output Buffer as a Working Memory Operator.

The Phonological Output Buffer (POB) is thought to be the stage in language production where phonemes are held in working memory and assembled into words. The neural implementation of the POB remains unclear despite a wealth of phenomenological data. Individuals with POB impairment make phonological errors when they produce words and non-words, including phoneme omissions, insertions, transpositions, substitutions and perseverations. Errors can apply to different kinds and sizes of units, such as phonemes, number words, morphological affixes, and function words, and evidence from POB impairments suggests that units tend to substituted with units of the same kind-e.g., numbers with numbers and whole morphological affixes with other affixes. This suggests that different units are processed and stored in the POB in the same stage, but perhaps separately in different mini-stores. Further, similar impairments can affect the buffer used to produce Sign Language, which raises the question of whether it is instantiated in a distinct device with the same design. However, what appear as separate buffers may be distinct regions in the activity space of a single extended POB network, connected with a lexicon network. The self-consistency of this idea can be assessed by studying an autoassociative Potts network, as a model of memory storage distributed over several cortical areas, and testing whether the network can represent both units of word and signs, reflecting the types and patterns of errors made by individuals with POB impairment.

A synaptic signal for novelty processing in the hippocampus.

Episodic memory formation and recall are complementary processes that rely on opposing neuronal computations in the hippocampus. How this conflict is resolved in hippocampal circuits is unclear. To address this question, we obtained in vivo whole-cell patch-clamp recordings from dentate gyrus granule cells in head-fixed mice trained to explore and distinguish between familiar and novel virtual environments. We find that granule cells consistently show a small transient depolarisation upon transition to a novel environment. This synaptic novelty signal is sensitive to local application of atropine, indicating that it depends on metabotropic acetylcholine receptors. A computational model suggests that the synaptic response to novelty may bias granule cell population activity, which can drive downstream attractor networks to a new state, favouring the switch from recall to new memory formation when faced with novelty. Such a novelty-driven switch may enable flexible encoding of new memories while preserving stable retrieval of familiar ones.