Brain oscillations and human memory: EEG correlates in the upper alpha and theta band

The EEG was recorded while subjects judged whether sequentially presented feature-concept pairs are semantically congruent. Later and without prior warning they had to perform a semantic and episodic memory task. 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 performers and that shows significant correlations with semantic memory performance during that time period, semantic processing actually takes place. Even when the influence of episodic memory was removed by partial correlations, a reliable association between upper alpha desynchronization and semantic memory was observed. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.