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Postdoctorial Fellowship Award Winner 

Cortical traveling wave pattern reinstatement supports successful associative memory formation and retrieval in humans

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 1 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon ABC.

Uma Mohan¹ (), Molly Baumhauer², Kareem Zaghloul¹; ¹National Institutes of Health, ²University of Michigan Medical School

The neural mechanisms that enable us to bind pieces of information together remain unclear. While the direction of large-scale spatiotemporal patterns of low-frequency oscillations across the cortex are known to support memory encoding and retrieval states, the functional role of microscale cortical traveling waves is less understood. Using intracranial electrocorticography data collected from 10 neurosurgical epilepsy patients during a paired associative verbal memory task, we examined the spatiotemporal patterns of low-frequency oscillations recorded on microelectrode arrays implanted in the anterior temporal lobe. We identify time periods during word pair encoding and subsequent cued recall when theta and alpha oscillations propagated in organized patterns across the cortex. We compared these patterns between encoding and retrieval and found that participants successful retrieved previously encoded word pairs when the same directional pattern of traveling waves that occurred when they viewed the pair occurred again, or reinstated, following the retrieval cue. Conversely, unsuccessful retrieval exhibit less precise or altogether absent emergence of previously observed directional patterns. These results provide evidence that the reinstatement of specific microscale directional patterns of traveling wave patterns in the anterior temporal lobe supports the successful retrieval of previously encoded pairs of information, supporting the hypothesis that recalling the past involves a form of dynamically neural recreation of the encoding context.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic