Recollection and Reconstruction Play Different Roles in Context Retrieval in False Recognition

After wordlists of semantic associates are studied, critical lures are not only falsely recognized, but also often attributed to strong semantic associates' contexts, demonstrating vivid context retrieval in false recognition. Why are some critical lures falsely recognized, while others are correctly rejected? Furthermore, why do some falsely recognized critical lures exhibit vivid context retrieval? What cognitive processes support the differentiation of various memorial responses to critical lures? The current study employed event-related potentials to investigate these questions. In the study phase, two pictures were paired with a critical lure's strong and weak associates. In the test phase, participants made old-new responses and, if items were recognized as old, further context memory judgments. The results showed that all kinds of critical lures elicited the early old/new effect, implying that familiarity do not support diverse memorial responses. Crucially, the left-parietal old/new effect was elicited by critical lures attributed to strong semantic associates' contexts, demonstrating that the bottom-up recollection process contributes to vivid false memories. On the other hand, critical lures attributed to other words' contexts elicited the late-posterior-negativity (LPN) old/new effect, suggesting that false memories with less vivid context retrieval rely on the top-down reconstruction process. Furthermore, correctly rejected critical lures elicited neither the left-parietal nor LPN old/new effect, indicating that critical lures were not falsely recognized when neither recollection nor reconstruction retrieved context. Taken together, the current findings elucidate important roles of recollection and reconstruction in retrieving context of false memories and further differentiating various memorial responses to critical lures.