Data for: Control of working memory by phase–amplitude coupling of human hippocampal neurons

Retaining information in working memory (WM) is a demanding process that relies on cognitive control to protect memoranda-specific persistent activity from interference. How cognitive control regulates WM storage, however, remains unknown. Here we show that interactions of frontal control and hippocampal persistent activity are coordinated by theta-gamma phase amplitude coupling (TG-PAC). We recorded single neurons in the human medial temporal and frontal lobe while patients maintained multiple items in WM. In the hippocampus, TG-PAC was indicative of WM load and quality. We identified cells that selectively spiked during nonlinear interactions of theta phase and gamma amplitude. The spike timing of these PAC neurons was coordinated with frontal theta activity when cognitive control demand was high. By introducing noise correlations with persistently active neurons in the hippocampus, PAC neurons shaped the geometry of the population code. This led to higher-fidelity representations of WM content that were associated with improved behavior. Our results support a multicomponent architecture of WM, with frontal control managing maintenance of WM content in storage-related areas. Within this framework, hippocampal TG-PAC integrates cognitive control and WM storage across brain areas, thereby suggesting a potential mechanism for top-down control over sensory-driven processes.

Sample code that illustrates how to replicate key figures/analysis in Daume et. al. can be found here: https://github.com/rutishauserlab/SBCAT-release-NWB

Note: sub-35_ses-1_ecephys+image.nwb is missing mean/std waveform data, but these data can be derived from the raw spike waveforms included in the file.