Spatial working memory and its neural substrate

Spatial working memory (SWM) is the limited and short lived maintenance of spatial information. It allows the manipulation of this information in short periods of time. Because memory is not a phenomenon that is directly observable, it must be considered an abstract construct from which inferences can be made. SWM is so automatized that most of the time we are not aware that we are using it unless it is malfunctioning or producing mistakes. SWM is prone to a large amount of mistakes and biases, e.g. directional foveal bias, in which the position of stimuli is remembered as closer to the fovea than the real position. These mistakes and biases do not seem to affect the overall performance of SWM. There are two approaches when it comes to research of SWM; the psychophysics approach is primarily concerned with understanding the characteristics, limits and thresholds; the psychophysiological approach of SWM is concerned the neural correlation between the brain and SWM. Psychophysiological studies of SWM have shown the important role the frontal lobe plays in this task in both humans and non-human primates. Some hypothesis have questioned if there are specific areas in the cortex which are involved in processing different forms of SWM, or if this distinction is related to the kind of processing of SWM. Even more research has suggested that there is no such distinction and memory is processed in a global manner by the prefontal lobe and other auxiliary areas.