Neurophysiological Manifestations of Recollective Experience during Recognition Memory Judgments

Abstract

Decisions regarding whether an item has been previously encountered are typically accompanied by one of two distinct forms of subjective awareness: either a general sense of familiarity, or conscious recollection of specific details from a prior study episode. To examine the neurophysiological concomitants of these different types of internal experience, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects engaged in a modified recognition memory procedure that required them to describe their subjective response during each testtrial. Stimuli that evoked recollection were accompanied by waveforms distinct from those that evoked only a sense of familiarity, and waveforms for both categories of correctly classified old items differed from correctly rejected distractor items and incorrectly classified (missed) studied items. These ERP responses are interpreted with respect to current knowledge concerning the neural structures and processes intimately involved in the capacity to engage in recollection.

The worth of pictures: Using high density event-related potentials to understand the memorial power of pictures and the dynamics of recognition memory

“…Associated with recollection, parietal activity is often observed to start between about 450 and 550 ms, and often lasts about 400 to 500 ms (Friedman & Johnson, 2000;Johnson et al, 1998;Smith, 1993;Smith and Guster, 1993;Woodruff et al, 2006). Here our data and analyses may be particularly informative for our model.…”

“…The parietal effect has been associated with recollection (Friedman & Johnson, 2000;Johnson et al, 1998;Smith, 1993;Smith and Guster, 1993;Woodruff et al, 2006). Examining the parietal effect for the different conditions, we found: (1) in the match condition the parietal effect stared earlier, was more left sided, and was much briefer compared to the nonmatch condition in which it started later, was bilateral, and lasted longer; (2) in the picture study condition the parietal effect was smaller and briefer compared to the word study condition in which it was larger and more prolonged; and (3) in the picture test condition the parietal effect ended much earlier than in the word test condition.…”

“…Therefore, this positive deflection has been associated with recollection. According to Friedman and Johnson (2000), this parietal effect increases with study-test repetitions (Johnson et al, 1998a), when items are rated as consciously recollected (Smith, 1993;Smith and Guster, 1993), and when a word is retrieved along with study context (Trott et al, 1999;Wilding et al, 1995;Wilding and Rugg, 1996).…”

Memory for perceived and imagined pictures—an event-related potential study

“…For example, Curran [15] reported that while both studied words and similar words (switched plurality between study and test) showed the frontal effect, only studied words were associated with the parietal effect. Furthermore, the parietal effect is of greater magnitude for items that participants "remember" (item + context retrieval) relative to those that participants merely "know" (item retrieval only) as previously studied [17,65] and for items correctly assigned to their study context [72][73][74]76], thereby strengthening the link to recollection.…”

“…Interpreted within the context of dual-process models, an early (300-500 ms post-stimulus) old/new effect has been linked to familiarity and is assumed to evolve from an attenuation of a frontal N400-like component for old items [14,15,39,41,56], whereas the enhancement of a late positive component (400-800 ms), typically, maximal at left parietal regions (but see, e.g. [69] for a spatially widespread effect) is held to index recollection [3,46,51,65,[72][73][74]76]. For example, Curran [15] reported that while both studied words and similar words (switched plurality between study and test) showed the frontal effect, only studied words were associated with the parietal effect.…”