Differential roles of frontoparietal regions in working memory and decision-making

Working memory (WM) and decision-making (DM) are closely linked cognitive processes that rely on frontoparietal regions, yet their distinct and shared neural dynamics remain unclear. Using intracranial EEG recordings from 24 human subjects performing a delayed match-to-sample task, we examined high-frequency broadband (HFB) activity to dissociate WM- and DM-related processes with high spatiotemporal resolution. Principal component analysis of frontoparietal HFB activity revealed multiple temporally distinct patterns spanning stimulus presentation and delay phases. The most dominant component reflected sustained WM-related activity across task phases, consistent with persistent maintenance of internal representations. Additional components captured transient WM encoding across trial phases, as well as both stimulus-linked and ramping DM-related activity suggesting dual early and late stages of evaluative processing. These processes were distributed across frontoparietal regions but showed systematic differences in anatomical focus, with WM-related activity concentrated in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and DM-related activity concentrated in ventrolateral PFC, while inferior parietal cortex preferentially tracked the behavioral significance of incoming stimuli and superior parietal cortex tracked the appearance of new information that may require updating ongoing processing. Together, these findings demonstrate that WM and DM processes are separable yet interleaved over time within distributed cortical networks, revealing coordinated but functionally distinct contributions to goal-directed behavior.