Abstract
Binding multisensory information into episodic memory depends partly on the timing of the hippocampal theta rhythm which provides time windows for synaptic modification. In humans, theta rhythmic sensory stimulation (RSS) enhances episodic memory when the stimuli are synchronised across the visual and auditory domain compared to when they are out-of-synchrony. However, recent studies show mixed evidence if the improvement in episodic memory is the result of modulating hippocampal theta activity. In the current study, we investigated whether pre-stimulus brain state could explain part of this variance in the neural and behavioural effects induced by the RSS, via recording 24 participants’ brain activity with MEG during a multisensory theta RSS memory paradigm. Our findings suggest that pre-stimulus alpha power modulates entrainment strength in sensory regions, which in turn predicts subsequent memory formation. These findings suggest that for non-invasive brain stimulation tools to be effective it is crucial to consider brain-state dependent effects.
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Data availability
Preprocessed data are available from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29468597. Any additional information required to reanalyse the data reported in this paper is available upon request.
Code availability
All original code has been deposited at https://osf.io/skm4q/.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from the Economic Social Sciences Research Council (https://esrc.ukri.org/, ES/R010072/1 to S.H. and K.L.S.) and the Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Program in Precision Medicine (MR/W006804/1 to E.M.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. The authors would like to thank Gabriela Cruz, Máté Gyurkovics, Hamed Haque, and Felix Siebenhühner from the Palva lab for their help on the MEG preprocessing pipeline, and Frances Crabbe, Xuan Cui, Jacqueline McDiarmid, and Gavin Paterson for their help on MEG and MRI data acquisition, and everyone from the Neurotechnology, Cognition and Oscillations Lab and Professor Maria Wimber’s lab at the University of Glasgow for their helpful inputs. The authors would also like to thank Tzvetan Popov for his suggestions and for sharing code on the eye tracking data analysis.
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Conceptualization, S.H., K.L.S. and D.W.; investigation, D.W. and E. M.; formal analysis, and writing—original draft, D.W.; writing—review and editing, D.W., E.M., K.L.S. and S.H.; funding acquisition, and supervision, S.H. and K.L.S.
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S.H. acts as scientific adviser to Clarity Technologies Inc. All other authors declare no competing interests.
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Wang, D., Marcantoni, E., Shapiro, K.L. et al. Pre-stimulus alpha power modulates trial-by-trial variability in theta rhythmic multisensory entrainment strength and theta-induced memory effect. Commun Psychol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00406-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00406-x
