The Impact Of Retrieval On Subsequent Memory Encoding:Evidence From An Event-related Potential Study

In recent years, some psychologists are paying more and more attention to the interaction between encoding and retrieval, and studying the encoding and retrieval as a impact factor to each other, the existing studies investigate the interaction of encoding and retrieval within the same time and space conditions, and find a relation of the nature of retrieval and encoding result, but the direction and the continuity of this interaction is not reflected, which are two important points to further understand the relationship between encoding and retrieval.Retrieval and encoding are separated in space and time in our research to further clarify which process is influenced in this interactional relationship, and the time cause of retrieval influence on the successive encoding process is also investigated by adding different time intervals between retrieval and encoding. The behavioral research finds:in the 500ms interval condition, performance of sequential encoding with retrieval effect is significantly less than the encoding without retrieval influence, retrieval affects sequential encoding only within 500ms. The event-related potential(ERP) technology is introduced based on behavior research to accurately explore effect of retrieval on sequential encoding and its brain mechanism, evidence of brain mechanism of effect of retrieval on sequential encoding is found in further research:in the picture encoding stage, there exists more negative going EEG in the left temporal lobe when the encoding is under effect of retrieval; in the picture retrieval stage, for those encoding items affected by previous retrieval, old/new effects disappears, the study also finds the isolation of brain mechanism about retrieval influencing sequential encoding, different retrieval effects on sequential encoding is related with inhibition of different brain areas, and the to-be-remembered items induce a more positive EEG in prefrontal as well as a longer duration of suppressing on left temporal regions when it is affected by successful retrieval.To sum up, we can draw the conclusion:picture learning will be affected when it is after the words retrieval in 500ms, compared with conditions of no retrieval, recognition rate of the pictures is significantly reduced, but in retrieval cases, there is no differences between the effect of successful and failure retrieval on picture learning. Inhibition to left temporal lobe by retrieval is the reason of sequential encoding destruction, brain mechanism separates according to different retrieval effect on sequential encoding, activation in prefrontal and a longer duration of inhibition on left temporal regions is related to the influence of retrieval result on encoding, and its level represents the cognitive costs.