Frequency-tagging in memory - context or reactivation?
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1
University of Birmingham, School of Psychology, United Kingdom
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2
Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, United Kingdom
Episodic memory allows us to mentally recover past experiences together with the spatio-temporal context in which the events occurred. Previous studies showed that retrieving a memory is associated with the neural reactivation of contextual information that was present during initial encoding. In a recent study (Wimber et al., 2012) we used flickering backgrounds to entrain distinct oscillatory brain responses during encoding, and demonstrated that the oscillatory brain state induced during encoding is rapidly recapitulated when a previously stored memory is successfully retrieved. This effect occurred surprisingly early - within 200-300 ms after presenting a reminder -and was only present for successfully retrieved memories, leaving open the possibility that memory performance is driven by an interaction between the oscillatory brain state induced at the time of encoding, and spontaneous fluctuations in the oscillatory brain state present during retrieval. In a follow-up study using combined EEG/MEG recordings, we investigated whether oscillatory activity prior to the presentation of a reminder influences memory performance in a context-dependent manner. We found that in an interval from -300 ms until onset of the reminder, successful memory retrieval was associated with changes in oscillatory activity specific to the frequencies entrained during encoding. Specifically, the successful retrieval of stimuli that had been presented on a 6 Hz flickering background during encoding was associated with increased inter-trial phase coherence at 6 Hz prior to the reminder, and the successful retrieval of stimuli that had been presented on a 10 Hz flickering background during encoding was associated with increased inter-trial phase coherence at 10 Hz prior to the reminder. These findings suggest that episodic memory benefits from an overlap between the neural context in which an event is initially experienced, and the neural context at the time of retrieval.
Keywords:
EEG,
MEG,
context,
brain oscillations,
episodic memory,
entrainment,
MEMORY REACTIVATION
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Memory and Learning
Citation:
Wimber
M,
Hanslmayr
S,
Henson
R and
Anderson
M
(2015). Frequency-tagging in memory - context or reactivation?.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00328
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Maria Wimber, University of Birmingham, School of Psychology, Birmingham, United Kingdom, m.wimber@bham.ac.uk