Patricia s. Goldman-rakic (1937–2003)

Access through your institution Buy or subscribe Goldman-Rakic's work focused on the brain's frontal lobes, in particular the prefrontal cortex. From an evolutionary point of view,

this is the most recently developed part of the brain, and is greatly advanced in primates compared with other mammals. Still, not much was known about it in 1965, when Goldman-Rakic

started working on the region as a junior research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda. She had recently completed her PhD at the University of California,

Los Angeles, where she studied rodent models of stress. Over the next ten years, Goldman-Rakic and her colleagues, along with other groups, created small lesions in the brains of adult

rhesus monkeys and other non-human primates, documenting for the first time that the prefrontal cortex is essential for a form of cognition termed working memory or executive function. This

refers to the ability of an individual to keep something 'in mind' while attending to other tasks. Working memory was measured with 'delayed-response' tasks; these come

in many forms, but the basic principle is that a monkey is required to maintain a mental representation of something, such as where a food reward is located, which guides its subsequent

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INFORMATION AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, 75390-9070, Texas, USA Eric J. Nestler Authors * Eric J. Nestler

View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Nestler, E. Patricia

S. Goldman-Rakic (1937–2003). _Nature_ 425, 471 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/425471a Download citation * Issue Date: 02 October 2003 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/425471a SHARE THIS

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