Functional neuroimaging studies have consistently implicated the left rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC) as playing a crucial role in the cognitive operations supporting episodic memory and analogical reasoning. However, the degree to which the left RLPFC causally contributes to these processes remains underspecified. We aimed to assess whether targeted anodal stimulation—thought to boost cortical excitability—of the left RLPFC with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) would lead to augmentation of episodic memory retrieval and analogical reasoning task performance in comparison to cathodal stimulation or sham stimulation. Seventy-two healthy adult participants were evenly divided into three experimental groups. All participants performed a memory encoding task on Day 1, and then on Day 2, they performed continuously alternating tasks of episodic memory retrieval, analogical reasoning, and visuospatial perception across two consecutive 30-min experimental sessions. All groups received sham stimulation for the first experimental session, but the groups differed in the stimulation delivered to the left RLPFC during the second session (either sham, 1.5 mA anodal tDCS, or 1.5 mA cathodal tDCS). The experimental group that received anodal tDCS to the left RLPFC during the second session demonstrated significantly improved episodic memory source retrieval performance, relative to both their first session performance and relative to performance changes observed in the other two experimental groups. Performance on the analogical reasoning and visuospatial perception tasks did not exhibit reliable changes as a result of tDCS. As such, our results demonstrate that anodal tDCS to the left RLPFC leads to a selective and robust improvement in episodic source memory retrieval.

Extant neuroimaging data implicate frontoparietal and medial-temporal lobe regions in episodic retrieval, and the specific pattern of activity within and across these regions is diagnostic of an individual's subjective mnemonic experience. For example, in laboratory-based paradigms, memories for recently encoded faces can be accurately decoded from single-trial fMRI patterns [Uncapher, M. R., Boyd-Meredith, J. T., Chow, T. E., Rissman, J., & Wagner, A. D. Goal-directed modulation of neural memory patterns: Implications for fMRI-based memory detection. Journal of Neuroscience, 35, 8531–8545, 2015; Rissman, J., Greely, H. T., & Wagner, A. D. Detecting individual memories through the neural decoding of memory states and past experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 107, 9849–9854, 2010]. Here, we investigated the neural patterns underlying memory for real-world autobiographical events, probed at 1- to 3-week retention intervals as well as whether distinct patterns are associated with different subjective memory states. For 3 weeks, participants ( n = 16) wore digital cameras that captured photographs of their daily activities. One week later, they were scanned while making memory judgments about sequences of photos depicting events from their own lives or events captured by the cameras of others. Whole-brain multivoxel pattern analysis achieved near-perfect accuracy at distinguishing correctly recognized events from correctly rejected novel events, and decoding performance did not significantly vary with retention interval. Multivoxel pattern classifiers also differentiated recollection from familiarity and reliably decoded the subjective strength of recollection, of familiarity, or of novelty. Classification-based brain maps revealed dissociable neural signatures of these mnemonic states, with activity patterns in hippocampus, medial PFC, and ventral parietal cortex being particularly diagnostic of recollection. Finally, a classifier trained on previously acquired laboratory-based memory data achieved reliable decoding of autobiographical memory states. We discuss the implications for neuroscientific accounts of episodic retrieval and comment on the potential forensic use of fMRI for probing experiential knowledge.