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Published on: August 26, 2011
Offset-related brain activity in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex promotes long-term memory formation of
Angela Medvedeva1, Rebecca Saw2, Carla Silvestri2
1Department of Psychology, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston Upon Thames KT1 2EE, United Kingdom; Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery, University of Texas Medical School at Houston, Houston, TX, 77030, United States.
Background:
Recent evidence suggests that brain activity following the offset of a stimulus during encoding contributes to long-term memory formation, however the exact mechanisms underlying offset-related encoding are still unclear.
Objectives:
Here, in three repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation studies (rTMS) we investigated offset-related activity in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC). rTMS was administered at different points in time around stimulus offset while participants encoded visually-presented words or pairs of words. The analyses focused on the effects of the stimulation on subsequent memory performance.
Results:
rTMS administered at the offset of the stimuli, but not during online encoding, disrupted subsequent memory performance. In Experiment 1 we found that rTMS specifically disrupted encoding mechanisms initiated by the offset of the stimuli rather than general, post-stimulus processes. Experiment 2 showed that this effect was not dependent upon rTMS-induced somatosensory effects. In a third rTMS experiment we further demonstrated a robust decline in associative memory performance when the stimulation was delivered at the offset of the word pairs, suggesting that offset-related encoding may contribute to the binding of information into an episodic memory trace.
Conclusions:
The offset of the stimulus may represent an event boundary that promotes the reinstatement of the previously experienced event and episodic binding.
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