Context effects on familiarity are familiarity effects of context — An electrophysiological study

Binding neutral information to emotional contexts: Brain dynamics of long-term recognition memory

“…In this line, Ecker, Zimmer, Groh-Bordin, and Mecklinger (2007) observed that novel neutral events generated larger early frontal activity than correctly recognized old neutral stimuli. These authors suggest that the brain response difference between new and old information at early stages of processing might be associated with an enhanced attentional capture (Ecker et al, 2007a). Thus, based on previous research, we interpret this finding as a result of enhanced processing of new objects, along with decreased processing of relatively nonrelevant (associated with neutral source information) old events.…”

Color and context: An ERP study on intrinsic and extrinsic feature binding in episodic memory

“…The intrinsic manipulation modulated both frontal and parietal ERP old-new effects, but there was no effect of the extrinsic manipulation on object recognition ERPs, as long as the feature was not made directly task relevant, in the exclusion task in Experiment 2. In this case, context affected the LPC recollection effect, as was expected, but the FN400 familiarity effect remained uninfluenced by context and can thus be considered acontextual, independent of task relevance (but see Ecker, Zimmer, Groh-Bordin, & Mecklinger, 2007;Tsivilis et al, 2001). Apparently, the representation subjects address in order to make an old-new decision via familiarity (the object token) includes intrinsic information, but it does not comprise contextual information, even if this information is voluntarily accessible and task relevant.…”

“…It can be assumed that the rich and unique landscape scenes used were distinct and salient enough to become "more than context" and achieve the status of familiar objects themselves (thus generating an additional familiarity signal via an object token laid down at encoding; see Ecker et al, 2007; see also Murnane et al, 1999). Yet, as in the present study, Tsivilis et al found no specific influence of a context manipulation on the ERPs; thus, the assessment of the old-new status of an object can be performed without influence of its context (but see Curran et al, 2006).…”

Perceptually or conceptually driven recognition: On the specificities of the memory deficit in schizophrenia

“…In line with this proposal, it has been argued that familiarity results from a bottom-up process in which the perceptual features of a cue lead the perirhinal cortex to retrieve object representations from memory. Top-down processes originating in the prefrontal cortex could then flexibly shift familiarity responses to be based on either perceptual or conceptual matching between cue and target (Ecker et al, 2007;Zimmer and Ecker, 2010). The present findings suggest an impairment of these prefrontal cortexdependent top-down processes in schizophrenia.…”