The influence of cue discrimination difficulty on encoding-related activity before an event suggests that the activity is limited in capacity and dependent

on other ongoing processes. This observation narrows down the functional role that can be assigned to such activity. The findings may be more compatible with an interpretation of the prestimulus activity observed here as an active preparatory process (Otten et al., 2010) or an increase in general attention (Park and Rugg, 2010) rather than a naturally occurring state that is especially conducive www.selleckchem.com/JNK.html to effective encoding (Meeter et al., 2004; Yoo et al., 2012). A caveat in this respect is that it is not possible to discern the precise nature of the processing resources that govern encoding-related activity on the basis of the current data alone. This is not a criticism of our study SD-208 datasheet per se but the dual task paradigm more generally.

The perceptual discrimination task that we used involves a number of functional processes, including perception, attention, working memory, decision making, and action control. Any of these processes could have interfered with the concurrent task of setting up encoding-related activity. Regardless, however, the current findings unequivocally demonstrate that engaging encoding-related activity before an event is not automatic but dependent on the availability of sufficient resources. This may explain why anticipatory influences on memory are observed in some situations and individuals but not others (e.g., Galli et al., 2011). The main type of prestimulus activity observed in the present experiment was a negative deflection over anterior scalp sites. This deflection strongly resembles the activity repeatedly seen in semantic processing tasks (Otten et al., 2006, 2010; Rutecarpine Padovani et al., 2011), including a recent investigation with experimental procedures similar to those employed here (Galli et al., 2012). Because the frontal negative deflection has thus far only been seen when an item’s semantic and associative features are emphasized,

this deflection is thought to reflect the adoption of mechanisms involved in the semantic processing of a stimulus ahead of stimulus presentation (Galli et al., 2012; Otten et al., 2006, 2010). Engaging such mechanisms early may enable the formation of a more elaborate and richer memory representation, which will be easier to retrieve later on (Craik and Lockhart, 1972). On this account, the difficult cue discrimination condition may have interfered with the engagement of semantic preparatory processes. The cue discrimination may have taken away attentional resources, a precursor for semantic processes. The fact that memory was affected by the time taken to discriminate the cue on individual trials supports this hypothesis.