When Anticipation Aids Long-Term Memory: What Cognitive and Neural Processes Are Involved?

Abstract

Review of Bollinger et al.In our daily life, we continuously anticipate and prepare for upcoming events. One question in cognitive neuroscience has been whether anticipation produces behavioral benefits and, if so, what the neural correlates of effective anticipation are. So far, several studies have shown that neural activity that occurs before an event can influence how that event is processed. Anticipatory activity modulates performance on several cognitive functions, including perception, attention, and memory.In a recent report published in The Journal of Neuroscience, Bollinger et al. (2010) demonstrated that both working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM) benefit from anticipation of a stimulus from a given category. Participants were instructed to memorize faces or scenes in a delayed matching-to-sample task. Crucially, target pictures were preceded by one of two types of cue: predictive cues ("remember face" or "remember scene") that indicated the category of the upcoming picture, and neutral cues ("remember face or scene") that did not indicate the category. Target pictures followed the cue after a fixed interval of 6 s. The experiment also involved blocks of passive viewing of faces and scenes. A postexperiment recognition task allowed investigation of LTM performance.Results showed that WM and LTM performances were better in the predictive condition than in the neutral one. The comparison between predictive and neutral conditions extends the literature about anticipation-related effects on LTM. So far, studies have investigated how different types of cue impact LTM formation [e.g., visual vs auditory cues , low vs high reward (Gruber and Otten, 2010), emotional vs neutral (Mackiewicz et al., 2006)], but those studies did not compare informative and neutral cues (or absent and present cues). As a consequence, the relationship between anticipation and LTM could be assessed at the neural level (for example, contrasting anticipatory brain activity for items that were later remembered with items that were later forgotten), but the effects of anticipation on LTM performance could not be directly assessed. Comparing cues with different degrees of predictability enables one to investigate the effectiveness of anticipation on behavior; this approach should be useful for future research.Interestingly, Bollinger et al. (2010) showed that predictive cues enhanced memory for faces but not for scenes. This result mirrored fMRI data reported by the authors. Predictive cues of faces elicited an increase of activity in the fusiform face area (FFA). An analogous increase was not observed for scenes in the equivalent stimulus-selective region, the parahippocampal place area. In addition to the univariate analysis, the authors used the ␤-series correlation method to examine functional connectivity. This analysis approach uses trial-by-trial variability to measure correlations in activity between different brain regions. Bollinger et al. (2010) showed that FFA activity following face-predicting cues was functionall...