Material differences of auditory source retrieval: Evidence from event-related potential studies

Two event-related potential experiments were conducted to investigate the temporal and the spatial distributions of the old/new effects for the item recognition task and the auditory source retrieval task using picture and Chinese character as stimuli respectively. Stimuli were presented on the center of the screen with their names read out either by female or by male voice simultaneously during the study phase and then two testa were performed separately. One test task was to differentiate the old items from the new ones, and the other task was to judge the items read out by a certain voice during the study phase as targets and other ones as non-targets. The results showed that the old/new effect of the auditory source retrieval task was more sustained over time than that of the item recognition task in both experiments, and the spatial distribution of the former effect was wider than that of the latter one. Both experiments recorded reliable old/new effect over the prefrontal cortex during the source retrieval task. However, there existed some differences of the old/new effect for the auditory source retrieval task between picture and Chinese character, and LORETA source analysis indicated that the differences might be rooted in the temporal lobe. These findings demonstrate that the relevancy of the old/new effects between the item recognition task and the auditory source retrieval task supports the dual-process model; the spatial and the temporal distributions of the old/new effect elicited by the auditory source retrieval task are regulated by both the feature of the experimental material and the perceptual attribute of the voice.     

Differences of relevance in implicit and explicit memory tests: An ERP study

An ERP study was conducted to explore the differences between other-relevant words and possessor-relevant words in implicit and explicit memory tests. The results show that other-relevant words are associated with a more negative ERP than possessor-relevant words during 300--900 ms whether in the implicit or the explicit memory tests. The N400 effect is also found in semantic processing of social materials. There is an ERP dissociation of retrieval formats between the implicit and the explicit memory tests during 700--900 ms, namely, there is no difference between other-relevant words and possessor-relevant words in the implicit memory while there is a significant difference between them in the explicit memory. Observed through Curry 6.0, the analysis of neural sources for other-relevant words and possessor-relevant words indicates that they have different locations. At 400 ms, activity is found in the left precuneus during possessor-relevant words processing. Both the right and the left precuneus are activated during other-relevant words processing. However, at 600 ms their location is both in the left precuneus. In a word, our results show that there exists a cognitive difference between other-relevant words and possessor-relevant words, and other-relevant words closely related to the percipient himself/herself are strongly responded to, which reflects that there is a bigger attention bias to the stimuli concerning the percipient himself/herself than to processor-relevant words.