Replay of Stimulus-specific Temporal Patterns during Associative Memory Formation

Forming a memory often entails the association of recent experience with present events. This recent experience is usually an information rich and dynamic representation of the world around us. We here show that associating a static cue with a previously shown dynamic stimulus, yields a detectable, dynamic representation of this stimulus. We further implicate this representation in the decrease of low-frequency power (~4-30 Hz) in the ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG), which is a well-known correlate of successful memory formation. The reappearance of content specific patterns in desynchronizing brain oscillations was observed in two sensory domains, i.e. in a visual and in an auditory condition. Together with previous results, these data suggest a mechanism that generalizes across domains and processes, in which the decrease in oscillatory power allows for the dynamic representation of information in ongoing brain oscillations.