Investigating the Role of Distractor Cueing in Pre-stimulus Associative Encoding Effects

Authors: Roman Lopez, Alana Muller, Raechel Marino, Rose De Kock, Yoselin Canizales, Richard Addante Abstract: The current experiment seeks to discover the neural correlates of ‘associative encoding’; that is, we are investigating the role of brain activity that occurs when people are learning the associations between two items that are paired together. While it is important to better understand this fundamental element to associative learning, the current experiment also innovates in important original ways as well. We are specifically interested in the role of on-going brain states that are occurring just *prior* to the onset of the stimuli, and in identifying how “pre-stimulus” cues (e.g. much like warning signs of an upcoming stimuli) might affect the subsequent memory storage that occurs thereafter during the actual stimuli. This pre-existing context that a given pair of stimuli are encountered in can play a key role in how information is both learned and forgotten but remains a largely unexplored area of memory that has only recently been discovered. The current study represents that effort to collect data from an experiment designed to behaviorally measure memory encoding effects as a function of pre-stimulus cues.