Study–Test Congruency Affects Encoding-related Brain Activity for Some but Not All Stimulus Materials

Abstract

Memory improves when encoding and retrieval processes overlap. Here, we investigated how the neural bases of long-term memory encoding vary as a function of the degree to which functional processes engaged at study are engaged again at test. In an incidental learning paradigm, electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of healthy adults while they made size judgments on intermixed series of pictures and words. After a 1-hr delay, memory for the items was tested with a recognition task incorporating remember/know judgments. In different groups of participants, studied items were either probed in the same mode of presentation (word-word; picture-picture) or in the alternative mode of presentation (word-picture; picture-word). Activity over anterior scalp sites predicted later memory of words, irrespective of type of test probe. Encoding-related activity for pictures, by contrast, differed qualitatively depending on how an item was cued at test. When a picture was probed with a picture, activity over anterior scalp sites predicted encoding success. When a picture was probed with a word, encoding-related activity was instead maximal over posterior sites. Activity differed according to study-test congruency from around 100 msec after picture onset. These findings indicate that electrophysiological correlates of encoding are sensitive to the similarity between processes engaged at study and test. The time course supports a direct and not merely consequential role of encoding-retrieval overlap in encoding. However, because congruency only affected one type of stimulus material, encoding-retrieval overlap may not be a universal organizing principle of neural correlates of memory.

The effects of negative emotion on encoding-related neural activity predicting item and source recognition

“…First, an important difference between these studies is that the face stimuli used in Righi et al are fundamentally different from the realistic pictures used in the other studies. Materials effects may account for differences between these studies, given that ERP correlates of memory can differ according to the materials used both at encoding and retrieval (Bauch and Otten, 2012;Yick and Wilding, 2008). Second, the lack of EEM effects in Galli et al and the absence of emotional effects on source memory performance in Koenig and Mecklinger may have been caused by the utilisation of a short study-test interval in both of these studies.…”

Reactivation of neural patterns during memory reinstatement supports encoding specificity

“…rhyme vs semantic processing, (Morris, Bransford, & Franks, 1977). Similar effects have also been found with manipulating the modality in which items are presented at encoding and retrieval, for instance using pictures and words (Bauch & Otten, 2012;Mcdermott & Roediger, 1994), or presenting words visually and aurally (Mulligan & Osborn, 2009). In cognitive psychology these match/mismatch effects can be subsumed under the terms Encoding Specificity Principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973), or Transfer Appropriate Processing (Morris et al, 1977).…”

Neural Pattern Classification Tracks Transfer-Appropriate Processing in Episodic Memory

“…This core prediction of the TAP account has received support from imaging studies (Bauch and Otten, 2012; Fellner et al, 2013; Staudigl and Hanslmayr, 2013; Staudigl et al, 2015; Vogelsang et al, 2016, 2018; Long and Kahana, 2017). Here, we replicate and extend the results from these previous studies by showing that the cortical reinstatement of the encoding brain patterns is only associated with beneficial effects for remembering if the replayed patterns are task relevant.…”

“…Furthermore, previous studies have shown that encoding-related brain activity (i.e., predictive of subsequent memory) is shaped both by the type of processing occurring at encoding and by the overlap between encoding and retrieval processes (Bauch and Otten, 2012; Fellner et al, 2013; Staudigl and Hanslmayr, 2013; Vogelsang et al, 2016; 2018; Long and Kahana, 2017). The typical procedure in these previous studies has been to investigate encoding-related brain activity when explicitly instructing participants to attend to particular attributes during the encoding and retrieval.…”