Strategic influences on recollection in the exclusion task: Electrophysiological evidence

Abstract

One assumption underlying the use of the exclusion task as part of the process dissociation procedure is that studied items are successfully excluded only when they are recollected. The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate that successful exclusion does not necessarily require recollection. In two experiments, the study tasks for to-be-excluded items were identical, but the tasks employed with target items differed, giving better memory for these items in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2. Successfully excluded items elicited the ERP signature for recollection-the left parietal old/new effect-in Experiment 2 only. These findings indicate that the subjects adopted different retrieval strategiesin the two experiments. It is suggested that they made more use of source information about to-be-excluded items in the second experiment than in the first.

Conceptual and perceptual memory: Retrieval orientations reflected in event-related potentials

“…Turning to the parietal positivity, the absence of recollection eVects in the ERPs to excluded, although in some sense recognised, items supports the observation of Herron and Rugg (2003b) that recollection is not a necessary condition for an exclusion decision. Instead, the data suggest that negative decisions can be based on a subset of the available evidence.…”

“…Do to-be-excluded stimuli produce involuntary old-new eVect in ERPs (cf. Herron & Rugg, 2003a, 2003b? Some memory eVects -such as recollection -are typically voluntary, whereas others -such as priming -appear to be beyond conscious control.…”

“…only when there was perceptual overlap between study and test, was there a recollection eVect for excluded stimuli (all the test stimuli were words). In a diVerent study by the same authors (Herron & Rugg, 2003b), exclusion instructions were given as in Jacoby's Process Dissociation Procedure (Jacoby, 1991) in two experiments. Depending on strategies induced by the study tasks, excluded stimuli elicited ERP recollection eVects in one experiment, but not in the other.…”

Source accuracy data reveal the thresholded nature of human episodic memory

“…More broadly, retrieval processing may operate within the context of support processes that can themselves influence whether recollection succeeds (Rugg & Wilding, 2000). For example, electrophysiological evidence has shown that the adoption of an appropriate retrieval orientation is predictive of recollection success (Herron & Rugg, 2003). One important implication of this view is that even when recollection fails, the memory being sought may nonetheless be retrievable using different cues, or by an alternative process such as familiarity.…”

The components of working memory updating: An experimental decomposition and individual differences.

“…The neuropsychology literature has corroborated these assumptions and suggests that automatic retrieval from long-term memory is limited to the recognition of single items (or highly unitized chunks). By contrast, associative retrieval of arbitrary bindings, such as object-location, word-temporal position, or face-name pairings, rests on slower retrieval processes that have been shown to be strategically controlled (Ecker, Zimmer, & Groh-Bordin, 2007;Herron & Rugg, 2003;Mecklinger, 2000;Meiser, Sattler, & Weißer, 2008). For instance, Ecker et al (2007) have shown that only intrinsic item features (such as an object's color or font) but not context features (such as background or location information) automatically affect object recognition, whereas contextual information is selectively retrieved via controlled recollection if relevant for the task.…”