Self-generation enhances familiarity-based associative recognition through the facilitation of unitization of...

A primary goal of research on associative recognition has been to identify the conditions that facilitate the formation of unitized representations of stimuli to be remembered, thereby enhancing familiarity-based associative recognition in recent years. In the present study, we sought to examine whether self-generation, as an active and internally driven form of relational processing, can support familiarity-based associative recognition by facilitating the formation of unitized representations. A total of 24 participants were recruited for this experiment. Participants studied triplets of Chinese single-character words. All words within a triplet formed a compound word with a fourth missing word. The missing word had to be produced before it was presented in the self-generation condition and was immediately presented in the read-only condition. In the test phase, participants had to discriminate between intact triplets that were repeated from the study phase and rearranged triplets, in which one or two words were exchanged with words from another studied triplet. The behavioral results revealed significantly higher P_r in the self-generation condition than in the read condition. The ERP results revealed a greater FN400 effect elicited in the self-generation condition than in the read condition. These findings demonstrate that self-generation enhances familiarity-based associative recognition to a significantly greater extent than the read-only condition.