2025/02/27 by Michael Preston, Natalie Schaworonkow, Bradley Voytek · 1 voice · 2 citations
Neuroscience · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research #Receptor Mechanisms and Signaling
paper · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2404-24.2025
Biological neural networks translate sensory information into neural code that is held in memory over long timescales. Theories for how this occurs often posit a functional role of neural oscillations. However, recent advances show that neural oscillations are often confounded with non-oscillatory, aperiodic neural activity. Here we analyze a dataset of intracranial human EEG recordings ( N = 13; 10 female) to test the hypothesis that aperiodic activity plays a role in visual memory, independent and distinct from oscillations. By leveraging a new approach to time-resolved parameterization of neural spectral activity, we find event-related changes in both oscillations and aperiodic activity during memory encoding. During memory encoding, aperiodic-adjusted alpha oscillatory power significantly decreases while, simultaneously, aperiodic neural activity “flattens out”. These results provide novel evidence for task-related dynamics of both aperiodic and oscillatory activity in human memory, paving the way for future investigations into the unique functional roles of these two neural processes in human cognition.