Figure 1. Left, the procedure for the learning and no-learning conditions in Experiment 1. The memory arrays are designed to be either associatively related or independent. Right, an example of images demonstrating semantic association.

Figure 2. Results of Experiment 1. The left panel shows Accuracy, and the right panel shows K value under the specified experimental conditions. Error bars indicate standard errors. *** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05; n.s. p > 0.05.

Figure 3. EEG Results of Experiment 3. The figure displays alpha oscillation plots under various experimental conditions (upper left). The total average time-frequency spectrum is presented in the upper right, and the average brain map during the maintenance phase is shown in the bottom right corner. The lower section of Figure 3 illustrates alpha power change values for the memory encoding phase (left) and the maintenance phase (right) under three experimental conditions: 2 items independent, 6 items independent, and 6 items associative. Error bars represent standard errors.