Differential roles of delay-period neural activity in the monkey dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in visual–haptic crossmodal working memory

Neural activity was recorded from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when a monkey performed visuo–haptic crossmodal and haptic–haptic unimodal delayed matching-to-sample (cue) tasks. Results indicate that neural networks in the DLPFC function sequentially in the crossmodal task from visual stimulus encoding and crossmodal information transferring between visual and tactile stimuli to the behavioral action. Our findings may clarify the neural mechanisms by which the cerebral cortex stores information in working memory, a cognitive function of prime importance in the coordination of behavior, speech, and reasoning.