In this chapter, we summarize the literature on the role of the PFC in memory tasks. For other, more targeted reviews, see Fletcher and Henson (2001), Simons and Spiers (2003), Szczepanski and Knight (2014), and Nyhus and Badre (2015). Here, we focus our summary of the literature on work not already covered in depth in these reviews; we also cast a wider net, integrating findings from humanand animal research across frontal subregions and experimental paradigms. The task is challenging, given the breadth of memory-related processes attributed to the PFC. The psychological and neural architecture of memory has been fractionated into distinct processes and systems (e.g., short-term vs. long-term, encoding vs. retrieval, episodic vs. semantic memory). However, there is evidence that supposedly system- and process-specific neural activity transcends categorical distinctions in the memory literature, as demonstrated by neuroimaging (Ranganath, Johnson, & D’Esposito, 2003) and human and animal lesion studies (reviewed in Fuster, 1995). Furthermore, there are inconsistencies across studies in the division of the PFC. While strict assignment of discrete functions to PFC subregions is questionable (see Duncan, 2001; Wilson, Gaffan, Browning, & Baxter, 2010), some models of the functional organization of the frontal lobes both within memory (e.g., Fletcher & Henson, 2001) and in cognition more broadly (Badre & D’Esposito, 2009) have proven successful in generating new questions and holding up to new evidence. When possible, we highlight commonalities across tasks and paradigms, adopting a component processing framework (Cabeza & Moscovitch, 2013); yet our review also reflects the literature as it stands, much of which operates from a memory systems framework. We also emphasize recent memory-related research on PFC–MTL interactions and the participation of the PFC in large-scale functional networks, highlighting distributed oscillatory interactions as a mechanism of dynamic network coordination in the service of memory function. We begin by discussing overall functional contributions of the PFC to working, episodic and autobiographical memory tasks. We then discuss distinct PFC subregions and processes that they implement across these measures of memory.
Drifting Assemblies for Persistent Memory