Editorial: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Working Memory

Visual working memory (VWM) allows us to temporarily maintain and manipulate visual information in order to solve a task. The study of the brain mechanisms underlying this function began more than a half century ago, with Scoville and Milner's (1957) seminal discoveries with amnesic patients. As of 2016, more than 4000 studies have examined the brain mechanisms underlying VWM. In this Research Topic, our goal was to bring together perspectives on the cognitive neuroscience of VWM from multiple fields that have traditionally been fairly disjointed: human neuroimaging, electrophysiological and animal lesion studies, both in adults and in development. The classic model of VWM posits that persistent delay activity in the prefrontal cortex is both sufficient and necessary to mediate visual working memory. Riley and Constantinidis contribute a thorough review of relevant primate studies, and provide compelling fresh evidence for it. They also survey a number of alternative models of VWM and conclude that each one can only mediate a limited range of memory-dependent behaviors. They also provide a detailed account of the tissue characteristics that make the prefrontal cortex (PFC) uniquely specialized to support this function. Further support for the classic model is provided by Boschin and Buckley, who enhance it by offering an account of the functions of the frontopolar cortex (FPC) from a series of pioneering lesion and behavioral studies in the non-human primate. Specifically, they suggest that the FPC supports the exploration and evaluation of relative values of novel alternatives, some of which may turn out to be distractors, while the dorsolateral PFC maintains, manipulates, and selects relevant information, rules and strategies for the task at hand. Mansouri et al. review the role of VWM in executive control functions with an emphasis on abstract features, and representations of errors and conflicts in order to make adaptive behavioral adjustments. They note that primate performance in a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task analog is disrupted after lesions of the dorsolateral PFC, orbitofrontal cortex, but also of anterior cingulate cortex. Tsutsui et al. offer an integration of findings on visuospatial WM from two animal models: primates and rodents. Both lesion and