Relationships between individual differences in dual process and electrophysiological signatures of familiarity and recollection during retrieval

Abstract

Our everyday memories can vary in terms of accuracy and phenomenology. One theoretical account that can help understand how to categorize these differences delineates between memories that are remembered versus familiar. This difference largely hinges on whether the memories contain information about both an item itself as well as associated details (Remember) versus those that are devoid of these associated contextual details (Familiar). This distinction has been supported by computational modeling of behavior, studies in patients, and neuroimaging work including differences both in electrophysiological and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Yet, compelling convergent evidence directly linking individual differences in estimates of Recollection and Familiarity, the mathematical estimates of differences in Remember versus Familiar judgments, with their concomitant electrophysiological signatures is lacking. The present study measured memory responses to a recognition memory task while participants underwent simultaneous electrophysiological recordings of brain activity. Non-parametric cluster-based permutation analyses revealed selective associations between electrophysiological signatures ofFamiliarity and Recollection with their respective behavioral estimates. These results support the idea that Recollection and Familiarity are distinct phenomena and is the first to relate individual differences in both Recollection and Familiarity to electrophysiological signatures.

Shared neural codes of recognition memory

“…Here, time-resolved cross-experiment classification of ERP signals (Dalski et al, 2022a(Dalski et al, , 2022c(Dalski et al, , 2022bLi et al, 2022) was used to find shared information content indicative of similar underlying memoryrelated processes across participants, stimulus modalities and tasks, and to probe how these signals unfold over time. Classifier training was conducted on data from experiments investigating face familiarity (Sommer et al, 2021;Wakeman and Henson, 2015), object familiarity and recollection (Dimsdale-Zucker et al, 2022), familiar and unfamiliar music (Jagiello et al, 2019), and remembered and forgotten object-scene associations (Treder et al, 2021). ERPs for highly familiar and unfamiliar faces comprised the test dataset (Wiese et al, 2022).…”

“…Three of the experiments in this report used single-session experimental familiarization: Sommer et al (2021) involved a 10 to 60 s familiarization phase with a previously unfamiliar single face image immediately before the start of the experiment. The 180-item acquisition phase and the test phase in Dimsdale-Zucker et al (2022) was separated by a 45–60-minute interval. Treder et al (2021) had eight, 32-item encoding/recall blocks, each with a 3-minute delay between learning and test.…”

“…Object familiarity and recollection (Dimsdale-Zucker et al, 2022). The dataset for this study contains data from 38 participants.…”

“…The interpretation and synthesis of existing findings on the neural basis of recognition memory are limited by the considerable differences in timing and topographical distribution across studies. This means that signals related to memory processes that do not conform to the canonical configurations described above may be overlooked (Dimsdale-Zucker et al, 2022; Kwon et al, 2022). Additionally, the averaged waveforms elicited by the presentation of stimuli are likely to reflect a multitude of temporally overlapping but separate cognitive processes (Campbell et al, 2020), making it difficult to disentangle the underlying neural mechanisms.…”

“…120 participants of both sexes across six experiments was performed (Dalski et al, 2022a, 2022c, 2022b; Li et al, 2022). The test dataset for the MVCC analysis consisted of an experiment involving personally highly familiar and unfamiliar faces (Wiese et al, 2022), and classifier training was conducted using data from two additional face memory experiments (Sommer et al, 2021; Wakeman and Henson, 2015), an experiment presenting short segments of familiar and unfamiliar music (Jagiello et al, 2019), a study investigating remembered and forgotten object-scene associations (Treder et al, 2021), and an object familiarity/recollection study (Dimsdale-Zucker et al, 2022).…”