1996; Chun and Turk-Browne 2007). Several researchers have started to examine these attentional mechanisms by investigating whether pretrial activity predicts retrieval success. Even if PXD101 chemical structure memory encoding

is generally thought to rely on brain activity following an event, an increasing line of evidence shows that prestimulus event-related potential (ERP) activity predicts later recollection (SME, subsequent memory effect), highlighting the role of the activity preceding Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical stimulus presentation in the formation of a lasting memory (Otten et al. 2006, 2010; Gruber and Otten 2010; Padovani et al. 2011). In order to investigate preparatory activity, all these studies focused on the neural activity in the time window between the presentation of different cue types and the stimulus onset. The cues switched randomly across trials and

indicated which type of task to perform on the upcoming stimulus. The resulting pattern of this preparatory encoding-related activation Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is characterized by a more pronounced frontal ERP negativity for later remembered versus later forgotten trials (Otten et al. 2006, 2010; Padovani et al. 2011). The debate about the mechanisms through which prestimulus activity modulates memory encoding Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is still ongoing. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to clarify if both sustained and transient attentional processes modulate the prestimulus SME and if so, to determine the timing of their influence. On a theoretical level, these Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical two types of attentional processes are generally described as executive attentional networks as for instance in the dual network model of attentional control (Dosenbach et al. 2008; Petersen and Posner 2012) and reflect different aspects of cognitive control. Sustained attentional processes prevail during repeated task sequences and reflect active maintenance demands associated with keeping

multiple task sets available and/or engaging attentional monitoring Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical processes to enhance sensitivity to environmental changes, induced for instance by cues (Braver et al. 2003). On the other hand, task switching sequences reflect mainly transient control processes associated with the change of the tasks, such as the reconfiguration and/or the updating of goals, leading to an appropriate reaction for the current task (Meiran et al. 2000; Braver et al. 2003; Monsell 2003; Reynolds et al. 2004). In this paper, we focus on the prestimulus brain activity and on its role in memory Dichloromethane dehalogenase formation. In order to investigate different aspects of this activity with the subsequent memory paradigm, we have performed two different studies using the same data set. In the first study, we aimed to identify different types of SMEs for emotional and semantic tasks (Padovani et al. 2011). In the current study we focus on the circumstances favoring the emergence of the prestimulus SME and investigate the relation between transient and sustained attentional processes and successful encoding.