• Christopher H Chatham, Michael J Frank, and David Badre.
• Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. Electronic address: chathach@gmail.com.
• Neuron. 2014 Feb 19; 81 (4): 930-42.

AbstractConvergent evidence suggests that corticostriatal interactions act as a gate to select the input to working memory (WM). However, not all information in WM is relevant for behavior simultaneously. For this reason, a second "output gate" might advantageously govern which contents of WM influence behavior. Here, we test whether frontostriatal circuits previously implicated in input gating also support output gating during selection from WM. fMRI of a hierarchical rule task with dissociable input and output gating demands demonstrated greater lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) recruitment and frontostriatal connectivity during output gating. Moreover, PFC and striatum correlated with distinct behavioral profiles. Whereas PFC recruitment correlated with mean efficiency of selection from WM, striatal recruitment and frontostriatal interactions correlated with its reliability, as though such dynamics stochastically gate WM's output. These results support the output gating hypothesis, suggesting that contextual representations in PFC influence striatum to select which information in WM drives responding.Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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