Catching Alpha in the Act: A Closed-Loop EEG Paradigm

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Husna Kider¹ (husna.kider@duke.edu), Vada Mayle², Emily B. Finch¹, Talaignair Venkatraman¹, Kenneth C. Roberts¹, Yiru Li¹, Matthew A. Slayton¹, Angel V. Peterchev¹, Andy Liu¹, Marty G. Woldorff¹, Simon W. Davis²; ¹Duke University, ²Indiana University

Numerous studies observed that pre-stimulus activity, such as pre-stimulus alpha power, shapes neural processing and post-stimulus behavioral outcomes. Pre-stimulus frontal alpha-band power at encoding has been linked to enhanced subsequent memory performance, potentially reflecting cortical deactivation of the Default Mode Network. Closed-loop paradigms optimize trials by only presenting stimuli after participants reach a targeted alpha state, allowing more insight into the causality of pre-stimulus alpha dynamics. Here, participants engaged in an object-memory task where this approach was used to control alpha state during object encoding and thereby modulate memory success. Individualized alpha-power distributions were collected during a practice task to define High and Low alpha thresholds corresponding to the upper and lower eighteenth percentiles, respectively. High and Low trials were randomized so that each stimulus presentation was contingent on alpha power within the pre-stimulus interval (−1000 to 0 ms), reaching the predetermined threshold within a mean of 2.4 seconds. Event-related spectral perturbations around each encoding event were extracted from the triggering frontal electrode, F3, and trials were sorted by whether the presented object was subsequently Remembered or Forgotten. Pre-stimulus alpha power was significantly greater on High versus Low trials (p<0.001), confirming success of the closed-loop design. Nevertheless, we observed no significant difference in subsequent memory for items triggered by high versus low alpha power. Analyses examining the impact of these states on memory performance are ongoing. These findings validate a closed-loop, frontal alpha-triggered approach for elucidating the cognitive effects of spontaneously varying endogenous neural states.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory