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Does coherence facilitate memory encoding?

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Justine A. Vorvis^1,2 (), Julie Tseng², Katherine Duncan¹, Donald J. Mabbott^1,2, Amy S. Finn¹; ¹University of Toronto, ²The Hospital for Sick Children

The ability to selectively attend to “targets” and ignore “distracters” develops slowly into early adulthood and has powerful consequences for memory. While adults exhibit memory selectivity for targets over distracters, this effect is smaller or non-existent in children. Importantly, we do not yet know the fundamental neural mechanism by which targets are prioritized in memory, let alone how this process differs across development. Does coherence facilitate memory encoding of target information in the human brain? We used magnetoencephalography to measure brain activity in 6- to 30-year-old participants (n = 26) while they selectively attended to either objects or faces in an n-back task. After the scan, participants completed a surprise recognition memory test for both target and distracter objects. Across ages, we expected the object-selective lateral occipital complex (LOC) to show greater coherence with other regions in the ventral stream when target objects were subsequently recognized versus not. We did not expect this pattern for the face-selective fusiform face area (FFA). In contrast to our prediction, the bilateral FFA and LOC showed greater high and low gamma coherence with other ventral stream regions for target objects that were not subsequently recognized as compared to those that were. Importantly, the LOC is selective for both face and non-face objects; thus, this finding may reflect greater attention to and coherence for distracter faces on trials where the target object was not subsequently recognized. Ultimately, our findings suggest that coherence may constrain memory for targets in the face of competing sources of information.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Development & aging