Figure 2

Verbal working memory task. (A) The measurement of interest was high-gamma activity during ‘high-load’ working memory trials containing four stimuli. Participants listened to stimulus letters, followed by a 2-s silent period, after which participants heard a target letter and overtly answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ regarding whether the target letter was included in the set for a given trial. (B) According to previous literature^2,4, working memory maintenance is theorized to be exerted during a 2-s silent period, whereas working memory scanning subsequently takes place following target onset. Since this working memory task minimally requires semantic or syntactic processing, common and differential high-gamma augmentations during this and the aforementioned task (Fig. 1A) are expected to reveal the profiles of task-related activation that may be attributable to verbal working memory operations. The response time was defined as the period between target offset and response onset.