Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 27, 2026
Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Effects of multiple study-test repetition on the neural correlates of recognition memory: ERPs dissociate remembering
Marianne De Chastelaine1, David Friedman, Yael M Cycowicz
1Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Department of Neurobiology & Behavior, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA. mdechast@uci.edu
Abstract:
Event-related potential (ERP) frontal (300-500 ms) and parietal (500-700 ms) episodic memory (EM) effects are thought to reflect, respectively, familiarity and recollection. However, as most ERP studies use preexperimentally familiar items, an alternative idea is that the frontal EM effect reflects conceptual priming. Repetition of unnameable symbols was used to assess modulations of the putative ERP indices of familiarity and recollection. The same symbols were viewed in each of 4 study/test blocks. Increases in familiarity and conceptual processing of symbols did not modulate the frontal EM effect, suggesting that it reflects neither familiarity nor conceptual priming. The magnitude of the parietal EM effect increased and its onset latency decreased across tests for items given remember (R) but not know (K) judgments. R and K old-new topographies differed. These findings support dual-process proposals that familiarity- and recollection-based processes are distinct.
