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Working memory (WM) is the ability to maintain and manipulate internal representations. WM recruits varying brain regions based on task demands. Although the hippocampus has historically been associated with long-term memory (LTM), several studies provide evidence for its involvement during WM tasks. Slotnick (this issue) posits that this involvement is due to LTM processes. This argument rests on the assumption that processes are not shared among WM and LTM, and that WM processes are necessarily sustained. We argue that there are processes utilized by both WM and LTM, and that such processes need not be sustained to support WM.

Adolescents experiencing anxiety or depression exhibit cognitive biases favoring the processing of negative emotional information. It remains unknown whether common neurobiological processes underlie these biases across anxiety and depression. Here, brain imaging was acquired from typical, anxious, and depressed adolescents during an emotional-interference task. Functional connectivity patterns were assessed while adolescents were cued to attend to or ignore faces. Results revealed a shared dimension of anxious and depressive symptoms was associated with reduced changes in connectivity patterns between conditions in which adolescents needed to ignore or attend to fearful faces. These findings were exclusive to fearful faces and observed only for functional connections with a primary face-representation area (fusiform gyrus). Results suggested a failure to flexibly adapt communication patterns with sensory-representation areas in the presence of negative emotional information, which may reflect a common neurobiological mechanism explaining biases favoring such information shared among adolescent anxiety and depression.