Motifs of human high-frequency oscillations structure processing and memory of continuous audiovisual narratives
- Akash Mishra
- Gelana Tostaeva
- Maximilian Nentwich
- Elizabeth Espinal
- Noah Markowitz
- Jalen Winfield
- Elisabeth Freund
- Sabina Gherman
- Marcin Leszczynski
- Charles E. Schroeder
- Ashesh D. Mehta
- Stephan Bickel
2025-07-25
The discrete events of our narrative experience are organized by the neural substrate that underlies episodic memory. This narrative process is segmented into distinct units by event boundaries, which facilitate a replay process that acts to consolidate each event into a narrative memory. High-frequency oscillations (HFOs) may synchronize neural activity during these processes. We use intracranial recordings from participants viewing and freely recalling a continuous, audiovisual stimulus. We find that hippocampal HFOs increase following event boundaries and hippocampal-cortical coincident HFOs (co-HFOs) occur in cortical regions that underlie event segmentation (inferior parietal, precuneus, lateral occipital, and inferior frontal cortices). Event-specific co-HFO patterns that occur during event viewing reoccur following event boundaries for the subsequent three events and during recall. This is consistent with models that support replay as a mechanism for memory consolidation. Therefore, HFOs may coordinate activity across brain regions that facilitate event segmentation, encode memory of discrete events, and bind representations to assemble memory of a coherent, continuous experience.