Posterior Parietal Cortex Persistent Activity and Working Memory

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The number of things that humans can hold simultaneously in memory for a short time (our working memory) is remarkably small. The maximum is thought to be seven, as in the number of digits in a phone number, but the average is about only four! The limited capacity of our working memory depends on neural mechanisms that are distributed in the frontal and parietal lobes of our brain, but the current state of our knowledge is far from complete. On the one hand, only basic memory mechanisms have been studied because there exists no adequate animal model to study working memory capacity. On the other hand, nearly all our knowledge about these basic memory mechanisms has been obtained from studies of the frontal cortex despite all the evidence indicating that the parietal cortex also plays an important role.