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WEEKLY FEATURED AUTHOR

SCHOLARPEDIA ARTICLES

Cortical memory

Scholarpedia, 2(4):1644 (2007)

Dr. Joaquin M. Fuster (b.1930 Barcelona, Spain) studied medicine at the University of Barcelona (M.D. 1953). In 1957 he emigrated to the United States to initiate a career in neuroscience at the UCLA. During 1962-64, he worked as a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. After receiving his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Granada, Spain, Dr. Fuster has been Professor of Psychiatry and a member of the Brain Research Institute and the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the UCLA's School of Medicine.

Dr. Fuster's major recent honors and awards include: Member of Honor of the Spanish Royal Academy of Medicine; Signoret Prize (University Sorbonne, Paris); Fyssen International Science Prize; Doctor Honoris Causa, University Miguel Hernández, Alicante, Spain; Goldman-Rakic Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience (NARSAD); and the George Miller Prize of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. His group has made significant contributions in cognitive neuroscience: (1) Showed that brain-stem reticular activation facilitates visual (tachistoscopic) attention (2) Pioneered intracellular records from the brain, showing a psychophysical power-function between visual stimulus intensity and synaptic potential amplitude in visual system (3) Showed reversible working-memory deficits by selective temporary cooling of cortical areas (4) With one of the earliest microelectrode drives developed by him for the behaving animal he discovered the first “memory cells” in the prefrontal cortex of the monkey in working memory (5) Discovered the first memory cells in inferotemporal (IT) cortex (6) Showed functional interactions between IT and prefrontal cells in visual working memory (7) Found tactile memory cells in parietal cortex (8) By using working-memory tasks of different modalities, showed the distributed and associative nature of cortical networks in working memory. Fuster is the author of over one-hundred peer-reviewed articles and three books: The Prefrontal Cortex, Memory in the Cerebral Cortex, and Cortex and Mind.

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Author profile by Biswa Sengupta

Each week Scholarpedia recognizes a different contributing author by featuring a short bio of them on the home page.

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While conscious (cs) experience has been discussed throughout history, the late 19th century saw a rise in physicalistic reductionism... more

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