The neural codes of conscious perception and working memory

MAURICIO CERVIGNI; ÁLVARO DELEGLISE

Cuadernos de Neuropsicología / Panamerican Journal of Neuropsychology

Centro de Estudios Académicos en Neuropsicología

Lugar: Santiago de Chile; Año: 2019 vol. 13 p. 60 - 83

Working Memory (WM) and conscious cognition are intimately related neurocognitive functions. If conscious processing interacts with the information stored and available in WM, and if access to consciousness is a necessary condition for certain information to be able to be retained in WM, then certain correlates, mechanisms and neural codes could be shared. In this review and opinion article, the role in conscious perception and WM of a distributed activity in a fronto-parietal cortical network and the synchronized oscillatory activity of neuronal populations in different frequency bands and at different spatial scales is examined. Although conscious access and the first phases of information encoding share part of their neural codes, the retention of information in WM in a particular state could involve additional codes. At the end of the article it is suggested that a neural phase code, the theta-gamma code, could be the mechanism implemented by a global neuronal workspace to encode conscious contents and retain information in WM.