{"doi":"10.1101/2021.04.30.442192","title":"EEG biomarkers of free recall","abstract":"Abstract Brain activity in the moments leading up to spontaneous verbal recall provide a window into the cognitive processes underlying memory retrieval. But these same recordings also subsume neural signals unrelated to mnemonic retrieval, such as response-related motor activity. Here we examined spectral EEG biomarkers of memory retrieval under an extreme manipulation of mnemonic demands: subjects either recalled items after a few seconds or after several days. This manipulation helped to isolate EEG components specifically related to long-term memory retrieval. In the moments immediately preceding recall we observed increased theta (4-8 Hz) power (+T), decreased alpha (8-20 Hz) power (-A), and increased gamma (40-128 Hz) power (+G), with this spectral pattern (+T-A+G) distinguishing the long-delay and immediate recall conditions. As subjects vocalized the same set of studied words in both conditions, we interpret the spectral +T-A+G as a biomarker of episodic memory retrieval.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2021,"id":224129,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9475,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":155692,"name":"Y. Li","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":722946,"name":"Jesse Kendall Pazdera","orcid":"0000-0002-4913-9236","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":270236,"name":"Colm Keane","orcid":"0000-0002-9009-9934","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":225216,"name":"Michael J. Kahana","orcid":"0000-0001-8122-9525","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":723690,"name":"B.S. Katerman","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":51,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:14.760456Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}