Congratulations to Obleserlab alumna Anna Wilsch, who is – for now – leaving academia on a true high with her latest offering on how temporal expectations (“foreknowledge” about when something is to happen) shape the neural make-up of memory!
Recorded while the Obleserlab was still in Leipzig at the Max Planck, and analysed with great input from our co-authors Molly Henry, Björn Herrmann as well as Christoph Herrmann (Oldenburg), Anna used Magnetoencephalography in an intricate but ultimately very simple sensory-memory paradigm.
While sensory memories of the physical world fade quickly, Anna here shows that this decay of short-term memory can be counteracted by temporal expectation.
Notably, spatially distributed cortical patterns of alpha (8−−13 Hz) power showed opposing effects in auditory vs. visual sensory cortices. Moreover, alpha-tuned connectivity changes within supramodal attention networks reflect the allocation of neural resources as short-term memory representations fade.
— to be updated as the paper will become available online –