Age-related differences in familiarity and recollection: ERP evidence from a recognition memory study in children and young adults.
Author
Summary, in English
Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined the relative contributions of familiarity and recollection to recognition memory for items and their study contexts in school-aged children and adults. Whereas adults were able to selectively accept target items and to reject familiar nontarget items in ail exclusion task, this discrimination was more difficult for children, as was evident in the high false alarm rates to nontargets even when item memory was controlled for. The analysis of the adults' ERPs revealed more flexible and task-appropriate retrieval mechanisms, as was evident in the correlates of familiarity, recollection, mid nontarget retrieval, as well as in postretrieval evaluation. In contrast, children's ERPs revealed a parietal old/new effect for targets taken as a putative correlate of recollection. These findings suggest that children rely predominantly oil recollection during recognition judgments, even in the absence of efficient memory control processes. The latter processes enable adults to monitor and verify the retrieved information and to control nontarget retrieval in the service of adequate source memory performance.
Publishing year
2005
Language
English
Pages
417-433
Publication/Series
Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience
Volume
5
Issue
4
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Psychonomic Society
Topic
- Psychology
Keywords
- EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS
- EPISODIC RETRIEVAL
- VISUAL COMPLEXITY
- PREFRONTAL CORTEX
- ITEM RECOGNITION
- DISSOCIATION
- LONG-TERM-MEMORY
- NAME AGREEMENT
- BRAIN POTENTIALS
- CONFIDENCE JUDGMENTS
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1530-7026