Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation affects distractor interference in auditory working memory

- Contrary to visuospatial working memory, role of the basal ganglia (BG) has been poorly studied in auditory domain.
- We test the effects of BG perturbation on non-spatial auditory working memory.
- BG modulation via STN-DBS in PD patients paradoxically increase RTs, but only when distractors are present.
- Suggests that during BG perturbation (ON STN-DBS), distractors are not properly gated out of maintenance processes.

Computational and theoretical accounts hypothesize the basal ganglia play a supramodal “gating” role in the maintenance of working memory representations, especially in preservation from distractor interference. There are currently two major limitations to this account. The first is that supporting experiments have focused exclusively on the visuospatial domain, leaving questions as to whether such “gating” is domain-specific. The second is that current evidence relies on correlational measures, as it is extremely difficult to causally and reversibly manipulate subcortical structures in humans. To address these shortcomings, we examined non-spatial, auditory working memory performance during reversible modulation of the basal ganglia, an approach afforded by deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus. We found that subthalamic nucleus stimulation impaired auditory working memory performance, specifically in the group tested in the presence of distractors, even though the distractors were predictable and completely irrelevant to the encoding of the task stimuli. This study provides key causal evidence that the basal ganglia act as a supramodal filter in working memory processes, further adding to our growing understanding of their role in cognition.