Enhancing cognitive control through neurofeedback: a role of gamma-band activity in managing episodic retrieval

Neural synchronization has been proposed to be the underlying mechanism for exchanging and integrating anatomically distributed information and has been associated with a myriad of cognitive domains, including visual feature binding, top-down control, and long-term memory. Moreover, it seems that separate frequency bands have different functions in these cognitive processes. Here we studied whether neurofeedback training designed either to increase local gamma band activity (GBA+; 36-44 Hz), or local beta band activity (BBA+; 12-20 Hz), would have an impact on performance of behavioral tasks measuring short-term and long-term episodic binding. Our results show that GBA-enhancing neurofeedback training increased occipital GBA within sessions, and occipital and frontal GBA across sessions. Both groups showed an increase of GBA coherence between frontal and occipital areas, but the BBA+ group increased BBA coherence between these areas as well. Neurofeedback training had profound effects on behavior. First, we replicated earlier findings that enhancing GBA led to greater flexibility in handling (selectively retrieving) episodic bindings, which points to a role of GBA in top-down control of memory retrieval. Moreover, the long-term memory task revealed a double dissociation: GBA-targeted training improved recollection, whereas BBA-targeted training improved familiarity memory. We conclude that GBA is important for controlling and organizing memory traces of relational information in both short-term binding and long-term memory, while frontal-occipital coherence in the beta band may facilitate familiarity processes.