Part-List Cues Hinder Familiarity but Not Recollection in Item Recognition: Behavioral and Event-Related Potential Evidence.

Tuanli Liu,Xuejun Bai,Min Xing

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.561899

Tuanli Liu, Xuejun Bai + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.561899

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Abstract

Participants’ memory performance is normally poorer when a subset of previously learned items is provided as retrieval cues than none of the retrieval cues is provided. This phenomenon is called the part-list cuing effect, which has been discovered in numerous behavioral studies. However, there is currently no relevant behavioral or event-related potential (ERP) research to investigate whether the forgetting effect caused by part-list cues is more sensitive to recollection or to familiarity. By combining the part-list cuing paradigm with the Remember/Know procedure, we investigated this issue in the present ERP study. Behavioral data showed part-list cuing induced detrimental effect in two aspects: significantly lowered familiarity of the target items and decreased memory discrimination score (Pr score) for “Know” but not for “Remember” items in the part-list cue condition than in the no-part-list cue condition. ERP data revealed that the FN400 old/new effects, which are associated with familiarity, were absent when providing part-list cues, whereas the late positive complex (LPC) old/new effects, which are associated with recollection, were observed comparably in both part-list cue and no-part-list cue conditions. Converging behavioral and ERP results suggested that part-list cues hindered familiarity-based retrieval but not recollection-based retrieval of item recognition. Theoretical implications of the findings for the part-list cuing effect are discussed.

Highlights

Memory retrieval is influenced by multiple factors (Baddeley et al, 2014), among which is the adequacy of retrieval cues (Tulving and Pearlstone, 1966)
Given that the memory performance decreased in previous studies using yes/no recognition task (Todres and Watkins, 1981; Oswald et al, 2006), we investigated the extent to which the behavioral memory accuracies and event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes of FN400 and/or late positive complex (LPC) effects would be decreased by part-list cues
The current study aimed to assess the relative contribution of recollection and familiarity processes to the part-list cuing effect in recognition memory

Summary

Introduction

Memory retrieval is influenced by multiple factors (Baddeley et al, 2014), among which is the adequacy of retrieval cues (Tulving and Pearlstone, 1966). When providing a portion of items from a previously studied list as retrieval cues and asking people to recall the remaining items, people often do more poorly on that list than do people asked to recall the items without the presence of such retrieval cues (Slamecka, 1968; Bäuml and Samenieh, 2012; Radvansky and Tamplin, 2013; Barber et al, 2015; Aslan and John, 2019; John and Aslan, 2020) This phenomenon is called the part-list cuing effect, which has been well documented by behavioral studies. The inhibition account considers the harmful effects of part-list cues on memory retrieval to be persistent because it reflects a long-term changes in the activation level of the target items (Bäuml and Aslan, 2006; Mickes et al, 2013)

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