Project Narrative

Working memory, the capacity to temporarily hold multiple pieces of information in mind for manipulation, is central to almost all cognitive abilities. Many mental diseases, including Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, dementia, bipolar depression, autism, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, involve working memory. The major goal of this project is to determine how the brain produces decisions based on working memory, via a coordinated effort by multiple researchers to observe, map, perturb, and model brain circuits with state-of-the-art technologies, which will provide critical clues to therapeutic approaches and constitute a major advance in basic science.