Abstract
Although many behavioral studies have investigated the effect of processing fluency on subsequent recognition memory, little research has examined the neural mechanism of this phenomenon. The present study aimed to explore the electrophysiological correlates of the effects of processing fluency on subsequent recognition memory by using an event-related potential (ERP) approach. The masked repetition priming paradigm was used to manipulate processing fluency in the study phase, and the R/K paradigm was utilized to investigate which recognition memory process (familiarity or recollection) was affected by processing fluency in the test phase. Converging behavioral and ERP results indicated that increased processing fluency impaired subsequent recollection. Results from the analysis of ERP priming effects in the study phase indicated that increased perceptual processing fluency of object features, reflected by the N/P 190 priming effect, can hinder encoding activities, reflected by the LPC priming effect, which leads to worse subsequent recollection based recognition memory. These results support the idea that processing fluency can influence subsequent recognition memory and provide a potential neural mechanism underlying this effect. However, further studies are needed to examine whether processing fluency can affect subsequent familiarity.
Highlights
Processing fluency refers to the ease or difficulty of current cognitive processing
RTs to primed pictures were faster than unprimed pictures [M = 680 ms, SE = 16 vs. M = 702 ms, SE = 15, t(15) = 5.603, p < 0.001, SE = 4.06], which indicated that masked priming facilitated the processing of primed pictures
The behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) results of this study suggest that picture processing fluency can impair subsequent recollection, which is consistent with the findings of previous studies regarding the effect of perceptual fluency on subsequent recognition memory (e.g., Hirshman and Mulligan, 1991)
Summary
Processing fluency refers to the ease or difficulty of current cognitive processing (for a review, see Oppenheimer, 2008). Studies using other methods to manipulate processing fluency (e.g., presentation of text in fonts that are easy or difficult to read) have shown that more-fluently processed items were associated with worse subsequent recognition memory (e.g., Diemand-Yauman et al, 2011; Sungkhasettee et al, 2011). Most of which altered the superficial features (e.g., font, Diemand-Yauman et al, 2011) of presented items to manipulate processing fluency, the present study used the masked repetition priming paradigm to manipulate fluency in the study phase. The advantage of the masked repetition priming paradigm is that subjects are unaware of the source of fluency during the experiment, which can mitigate the influence of subjective strategy with respect to items of different fluency magnitudes
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