Distributed memory for both short and long term.

Neuropsychology points to the wide distribution of cortical memory networks. Electrophysiology and neuroimaging indicate that working memory, like long-term memory, is a widely distributed function, largely neocortical. Most of the evidence available from those three methodologies suggests that both working memory and long-term memory share the same substrate: a system of broad, partly overlapping and interconnected neocortical networks. Working memory appears mostly, if not completely, characterized by the sustained activation of one widely distributed network of long-term memory. That activation is at least in part sustained by reentrant excitatory loops through the different neuronal assemblies that constitute the network and that represent the associated features of the memorandum. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.