Structural (operational) synchrony of EEG alpha activity during an auditory memory task.

Abstract

Memory paradigms are often used in psycho-physiological experiments in order to understand the neural basis underlying cognitive processes. One of the fundamental problems encountered in memory research is how specific and complementary cortical structures interact with each other during episodic encoding and retrieval. A key aspect of the research described below was estimating the coupling of rapid transition processes (in terms of EEG description) which occur in separate cortical areas rather than estimating the routine phase-frequency synchrony in terms of correlation and coherency. It is assumed that these rapid transition processes in the EEG amplitude correspond to the "switching on/off" of brain elemental operations. By making a quantitative estimate of the EEG structural synchrony of alpha-band power between different EEG channels, it was shown that short-term memory has the emergent property of a multiregional neuronal network, and is not the product of strictly hierarchical processing based on convergence through association regions. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the dynamic temporal structure of alpha activity is strongly correlated to the dynamic structure of working memory.