BRAIN OSCILLATIONS AND HUMAN-MEMORY - EEG CORRELATES IN THE UPPER ALPHA-BAND AND THETA-BAND

The EEG was recorded while subjects judged whether sequentially presen ted feature-concept pairs are semantically congruent. Later and withou t prior warning they had to perform a semantic and episodic memory tas k. The results show that the upper alpha band is most sensitive to the encoding and processing of semantic information. It is only the upper alpha band that distinguishes between good and bad semantic memory pe rformers and that shows significant correlations with semantic memory performance during that time period, semantic processing actually take s place. Even when the influence of episodic memory was removed by par tial correlations, a reliable association between upper alpha desynchr onization and semantic memory was observed. (C) 1997 Published by Else vier Science Ireland Ltd.