Dr. Wang received his B.S. in Biology from East China Normal University (ECNU) Shanghai in 2003. From 2003 to 2009, he was in a joint PhD program between Johns Hopkins University and ECNU and received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from ECNU in 2008. He then did his first postdoctoral work at the University of Tokyo in Japan, and got his second postdoc training in INSERM NeuroSpin Institute in France. Wang joined the Institute of Neuroscience full time in 2016 as Investigator and Head of the Laboratory of Comparative Psychobiology. His main interests are the neural mechanisms underlying sequential learning, working memory and bodily self-consciousness.

Title: The control of sequence working memory in macaque frontal cortex

Abstract:

One of the most intriguing puzzles in cognitive neuroscience is understanding the neural mechanisms behind mental operations. How the brain mentally sorts a series of items in a specific order within working memory (WM) remains largely unknown. We investigated mental sorting using high-throughput electrophysiological recordings in the frontal cortex of macaque monkeys, who memorized and sorted spatial sequences in forward or backward orders according to visual cues. We discovered that items at each ordinal rank in WM were encoded in separate rank-WM subspaces and then, depending on cues, were maintained or reordered between the subspaces, accompanied by two extra temporary subspaces in two operation steps. Furthermore, the cue activity served as an indexical signal to trigger sorting processes. Thus, we propose a complete conceptual framework, where the neural landscape transitions in frontal neural states underlie the symbolic system for mental programming of sequence WM.