Event-related Brain Potentials During Recognition of Ordinary and Bizarre Action Phrases Following Verbal and Subject-performed Encoding Conditions

Abstract

Recognition performance of ordinary and bizarre action phrases was compared under two encoding conditions: In a verbal condition (V), participants learned the phrases by passively listening to them; in a subjectperformed condition (SP), participants learned the phrases by actively performing the denoted actions with imaginary objects. Recognition performance was better in condition SP than V. Moreover, recognition was better for bizarre than for ordinary phrases but only in condition V. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the recognition test. In condition SP a larger fronto-central negativity was found. This confirms the hypothesis that the SP advantage is due to the reactivation of motor information. Additionally, the later part of the recognition memory ERP effect was analysed. This effect reflects the overall familiarity of items in a recognition test. The amplitude increases with decreasing familiarity. In the present study, an enlarged amplitude was found for bizarre phrases in both conditions, V and SP. This suggests that recognition knowledge is present after SP and V. Moreover, according to the behavioural data, this knowledge seems to improve recognition performance only in condition V.