ReviewThe European journal of neuroscience2018
Mnemonic and attentional roles for states of attenuated alpha oscillations in perceptual working memory: a review.
Review in The European journal of neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Alpha phase coding supports feature binding during working memory maintenance.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Mapping neural activity during naturalistic visual and memory search.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Temporal Structure of Item Presentation Modulates Brain Oscillations in Verbal Working Memory.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Decoding Auditory Working Memory Load From EEG Alpha Oscillations.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- The impact of category-based retro-cues on representational prioritization in visual working memory: behavioral and EEG evidence.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Microsaccades strongly modulate but do not directly cause the EEG N2pc marker of spatial attention.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Differential representations of spatial location by aperiodic and alpha oscillatory activity in working memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of Reselecting Visual and Motor Contents in Working Memory after External Interference.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Linking the multiple-demand cognitive control system to human electrophysiological activity.Neuropsychologia · 2025Review
- Top-down selection of visual working memory contents is supported by alpha-band phase-synchronized oscillatory networks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neural dynamics of shifting attention between perception and working-memory contents.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Discriminating orientation information with phase consistency in alpha and low-gamma frequency bands: an EEG study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Multiplexed Levels of Cognitive Control through Delta and Theta Neural Oscillations.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Microsaccades reflect attention shifts: a mini review of 20 years of microsaccade research.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Event-related modulation of alpha rhythm explains the auditory P300-evoked response in EEG.eLife · 2023Article
- The association between working memory precision and the nonlinear dynamics of frontal and parieto-occipital EEG activity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Microsaccades transiently lateralise EEG alpha activity.Progress in neurobiology · 2023Article
- Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans.Science advances · 2022Article
- Unveiling the Associations between EEG Indices and Cognitive Deficits in Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Review.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
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Abstract
Alpha oscillations are often reported to be amplified during working memory (WM) retention, serving to disengage sensory areas to protect internal representations from external interference. At the same time, contemporary views of WM postulate that sensory areas may often also be recruited for retention. I here review recent evidence that during such 'perceptual' WM, alpha oscillations in mnemonically relevant sensory areas are not amplified but attenuated instead. I will argue that such attenuated alpha states serve a mnemonic role and, further, that larger attenuation may support item-specific attentional prioritisation within perceptual WM. In critically evaluating this role, I also consider (and argue against) four alternatives to a strictly mnemonic account of the available data that may also prove useful to consider in future research. Finally, I highlight key implications of these data for the study of WM and for our understanding of the functional roles of states of attenuated alpha oscillations in cognition.
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