Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during recognition tasks for spoken words alone (items) or for both words and the voice of the speaker (sources). Neither performance nor ERP measures suggested that voice information was retrieved automatically during the item-recognition task. In both tasks, correctly recognized old words elicited more positive ERPs than new words, beginning around 400 ms poststimulus onset. In the source task only, old words also elicited a focal prefrontal positivity beginning about 700 ms. The prefrontal task effect did not distinguish trials with accurate and inaccurate voice judgments and is interpreted as reflecting the search for voice information in memory. More posterior recording sites were sensitive to the successful recovery of voice or source information. The results indicate that word and voice information were retrieved hierarchically and distinguish retrieval attempt from retrieval success.Everyone has had the experience of remembering a fact without being able to recall how it was learned. Remembering the source of one's knowledge is not always important, but in some cases, it may be critical for one's subsequent actions. If you own a cellular phone, it is important to remember whether the link between such phones and brain tumors was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine or the National Enquirer. Source memory can be broadly defined as memory for the context of a learning episode, encompassing perceptual features (e.g., the voice or face of a speaker who conveyed some information, visual or auditory modality of a word), spatial location, temporal sequence of events, and whether an event was imagined or actually took place (for a review, see Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993).A few recent neuropsychological studies have suggested that source memory is dissociable from other forms of memory. In a group of patients with amnesia subsequent to brain damage, Schacter, Harbluk, and McLachlan (1984) found that the level of impairment for remembering trivia facts was uncorrelated with performance in remembering which experimenter conveyed the facts that were recalled. Squire (1987, 1991) reported similar findings in both amnesic patients and those with temporary We are grateful to Ron Ohst for software support and to Sheryl Reminger for assistance with editing stimuli.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ava J. Senkfor, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0068. Electronic mall may be sent to asenkfor @ rosalind.ucsd.edu. memory impairment following electroconvulsive therapy. Janowsky, Shimamura, and Squire (1989) obtained a particularly clear dissociation between item and source memory in patients who were not generally amnesic. Patients with damage confined to the frontal lobe exhibited normal recall and recognition of trivia facts learned in the laboratory but a disproportionate number of errors of attributing their knowledge to an extraexperimental source. This demonstration that frontal cortex i...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during initial study and recognition of words and novel visual patterns. Words and patterns yielded similar recognition results that discriminated correctly recognized old items from correct new items, incorrect old items, and incorrect new items. The study phase data included a number of dissociations between words and patterns. Occasional repeated items yielded faster reaction times for both stimulus types but a late positive ERP repetition effect for words only. The study phase data differentiated words that would later be recognized versus unrecognized, but the patterns did not yield a similar encoding effect. Moreover, the study phase positivity contingent on subsequent recognition was restricted to words that received a positive semantic judgment during study. The functional relationships among the repetition, recognition, and encoding effects are discussed.

Age-related deficits in source memory have been attributed to alterations in prefrontal cortex (PFC) function, but little is known about the neural basis of such changes. The present study examined the time course of item and source memory retrieval by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in patients with focal lesions in lateral PFC and in healthy older and young controls. Both normal aging and PFC lesions were associated with decrements in item and source memory. However, older controls showed a decrease in item hit rate with no change in false alarms, whereas patients showed the opposite pattern. Furthermore, ERPs revealed notable differences between the groups. The early positive-going old/new effect was prominent in the young but reduced in patients and older adults, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, older adults displayed a prominent left frontal negativity (600-1200 ms) not observed in the young. This left frontal effect was substantially smaller and delayed in the patients. The current results provide novel insights into the effects of aging on source memory and the role of the lateral PFC in these processes. Older controls appeared to adopt alternate memory strategies and to recruit compensatory mechanisms in left PFC to support task performance. In contrast, the lateral frontal patients were unable to use these mechanisms, thus exhibiting difficulties with strategic memory and monitoring processes.

Cognitive research shows that people typically remember actions they perform better than those that they only watch or imagine doing, but also at times misremember doing actions they merely imagined or planned to do (source memory errors). Neural research suggests some overlap between brain regions engaged during action production, motor imagery, and action observation. The present study evaluates the similar-ities/differences in brain activity during the retrieval of various types of action and nonaction memories. Participants study real objects in one of four encoding conditions: performing an action, watching the experimenter perform an action, or imagining an action with an object, or a nonmotoric task of estimating an object's cost. At test, participants view color photos of the objects, and make source memory judgments about the initial encoding episodes. Event-related potentials (ERPs) during test reveal (1) content-specific brain activity depending on the nature of the encoding task, and (2) a hand tag, i.e., sensitivity to the hand with which an object had been manipulated at study. At fronto-central sites, ERPs are similar for the three action-retrieval conditions, which are distinct from those to the cost-encoded objects. At occipital sites ERPs distinguished objects from encoding conditions with visual motion (Perform and Watch) from those without visual motion (Imagine and Cost). Results thus suggest some degree of recapitulation of encoding brain activity during retrieval of memories with qualitatively distinct attributes.

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Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during recognition tasks for line drawings (items) or for both drawings and their spatial locations (sources). Recognized drawings elicited more positive ERPs than new drawings. Independent of accuracy in the spatial judgment, the old/new effect in the source recognition task was larger over the prefrontal scalp, and of longer temporal duration than in the item recognition task, suggesting that the source memory task engaged a qualitatively distinct memory process. More posterior scalp sites were sensitive to the accuracy of the source judgment, but this effect was delayed relative to the difference between studied and unstudied drawings, suggesting that source memory processes are completed after item recognition. Similarities and differences between spatial source memory and memory for conjunctions of other stimulus attributes are discussed, together with the role of prefrontal cortex in memory.

It has been suggested that performing a physical action (enactment) is an optimally effective encoding task, due to the incorporation of motoric information in the episodic memory trace, and later retrieval of that information. The current study contrasts old/new recognition of objects after enactment to a conceptual encoding task of cost estimation. Both encoding tasks yielded high accuracy, and robust differences in brain activity as compared to new objects, but no differences between encoding tasks. These results are not supportive of the idea that encoding by enactment leads to the spontaneous retrieval of motoric information. When participants were asked to discriminate between the two classes of studied objects during a source memory task, perform-encoded objects elicited higher accuracy and different brain activity than cost-encoded objects. The extent and nature of what was retrieved from memory thus depended on its utility for the assigned memory test: object information during the old/new recognition test, but additional information about the encoding task when necessary for a source memory test. Event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during the two memory tests showed two orthogonal effects during an early (300-800 ms) time window: a differentiation between studied and unstudied objects, and a test-type (retrieval orientation) effect that was equivalent for old and new objects. Later brain activity (800-1300 ms) differentiated perform-from cost-encoded objects, but only during the source memory test, suggesting temporally distinct phases of retrieval.