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Memory retrieval effects as a function of differences in phenomenal experience
Austin H Schmidt1, C Brock Kirwan2,3,4
1Neuroscience Center, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA.
Brain Imaging and Behavior
|May 6, 2024
Summary
Individual differences in how people visualize or verbalize information impact brain activity during memory retrieval. This suggests cognitive styles influence neural patterns for recalling words and faces.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Neuroimaging
- Psychology
Background:
- Conscious experience is typically singular, yet individual differences in phenomenal experience are known to affect behavior.
- The influence of these subjective representational differences on memory processes remains incompletely understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how individual cognitive biases toward visual imagery or internal verbalization influence neural activity during memory encoding and retrieval.
- To examine the relationship between these representational biases and memory performance for different stimulus types (faces and words).
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan 49 participants during memory encoding and recognition tasks.
- Participants completed the Internal Representations Questionnaire (IRQ) to assess cognitive bias (Visual Imagery vs. Internal Verbalization).
- Behavioral memory performance and fMRI activation patterns were analyzed in relation to individual cognitive bias scores.
Main Results:
- No significant correlation was found between visual imagery/internal verbalization bias and overall memory performance.
- fMRI revealed typical activation differences for faces versus words during encoding and retrieval.
- At retrieval, a bias toward visualization correlated with memory-related activation in the inferior occipital gyri.
- A crossover interaction showed visualization bias enhanced word retrieval activation, while verbalization bias enhanced face retrieval activation.
Conclusions:
- Individual differences in cognitive representations (visualization vs. verbalization) are associated with distinct neural activation patterns during memory retrieval.
- These representational biases may modulate the neural effort required for retrieving different types of stimuli.
- The findings suggest that subjective cognitive styles can shape the neural underpinnings of memory retrieval performance.
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