my brian hurts...the relationship between attention and WM

From the memory field studies done by Funahashi et al., a cell can be excited to certain direction, but at the same time being inhibited to other opposite directions. Similar to this phenomenon, in human visual cortex, when subjects attend to certain locations, the corresponding visual cortex are enhanced, but other areas are suppressed. What does such inhibitory and excitatory process tell us about the characteristics of working memory? Is it a synonym to attention, part of attention, or something else?