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This Event-Related Potential (ERP) study investigated whether components commonly measured at test, such as the FN400 and the parietal old/new components, could be observed during encoding and, if so, whether they would predict different levels of accuracy on a subsequent memory test. ERPs were recorded while subjects classified pictures of objects as man-made or natural. Some objects were only classified once while others were classified twice during encoding, sometimes with an identical picture, and other times with a different exemplar from the same category. A subsequent surprise recognition test required subjects to judge whether each probe word corresponded to a picture shown earlier, and if so whether there were two identical pictures that corresponded to the word probe, two different pictures, or just one picture. When the second presentation showed a duplicate of an earlier picture, the FN400 effect (a significantly less negative deflection on the second presentation) was observed regardless of subsequent memory response; however, when the second presentation showed a different exemplar of the same concept, the FN400 effect was only marginally significant. In contrast, the parietal old/new effect was robust for the second presentation of conceptual repetitions when the test probe was subsequently recognized, but not for identical repetitions. These findings suggest that ERP components that are typically observed during an episodic memory test can be observed during an incidental encoding task, and that they are predictive of the degree of subsequent memory performance.

People with larger working memory capacity exhibit enhanced free recall but do not show any advantage on tests of recognition. This pair of results suggests that differences in the strategies that people bring to the task of learning and retrieving are superior in learners with high working memory. There is ample evidence that learners with high working memory do indeed bring better strategies to both encoding and retrieval, but as yet little evidence of whether higher working memory is related to greater effectiveness in prioritizing information across materials that differ in value. Using the value-directed remembering paradigm of Castel, Benjamin, Watkins, and Craik (2002), we examined whether learners with high working memory capacity show a particular advantage in remembering materials that are of high value. Across four experiments, we found that high working memory capacity led to a selective preference for remembering high-valued word pairs, but the effect was very modest and does not provide a complete picture of the relationship between working memory and recall.

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