The Effects Of Divided Attention During Retrieval On Familiarity And Recollection

Results from cognitive,neuropsychologieal,and neuroimaging studies of human memory indicate that recognition memory performance reflects two distinct memory processes: recollection and familiarity.Recollection involves the retrieval of specific details associated with something recognized;Familiarity is an assessment of the overall similarity between a test item and all study-list information in memory.Previous ERP studies of the recollection and familiarity suggest that:300-500 ms FN400 ERP old-new effect is related to familiarity,and the 400-800 ms parietal ERP old-new effect is related to recollection.But,this hypothesis has yet to be confirmed.Studies are also a focus of concern that whether the familiarity reflects conceptual fluency or perceptual fluency.Attention is an important factors that can influence memory.There is a lot of studies about the effects of divided attention on encoding processes.But,there are few studies about the effects of divided attention on retrieval processes.Few studies concern about the effects of divided attention during retrieval on recollection and familiarity,and these studies are lack of brain mechanism.Using Event-related Potentials,the present study used a study-test paradigm and adopt Chinese characters as stimuli.The purpose of our studies is to explore the dissociation of recollection from familiarity in conceptual-similarity and the effects of divided attention during retrieval on recollection and familiarity.In the fhst experiment,learning the words is the task of study stage.In the testing stage,the task is making "old\new" judgment.There is three kinds of words in the testing stage including old words,similar words(conceptual-similarity with old words)and new words(nonconceptual-sirnilarity with old words).The results showed that(1) Familiarity patterns reflect in FN400 and later(900-1000ms) anterior frontal and frontal.(2) Recollection patterns reflect in all the brain regions(430-600ms) and the largest regions are parietal.Recollection patterns also reflect in later(600-700ms) frontal.In the second experiment, the testing stage adds interfering task that ask the participants to account the total numbers of "0".The results shows that(1) Familiarity patterns reflect in frontal,central and parietal in the timing including N400,500-600ms and 600-850ms.(2) Recollection patterns reflect in the frontal and central in the timing of 600-850ms.Recollection patterns also reflect in later(850-1000ms) frontal.We confirmed the hypothesis that FN400 ERP old-new effect is related to familiarity,and the parietal ERP old-new effect is related to recollection.The familiarity reflects conceptual fluency. In the second experiment,we fred that the familiarity processes actives more regions than the first experiment and the timing of the familiarity processes becomes longer than the first experiment. But,the recollection processes actives less regions than the first experiment.The divided attention in retrieval decrease the recollection effects,but increase the familiarity effects.