Stimulus-based mirror effects in associative recognition revisited.

Four experiments compare the effect of familiarity on item, associative, and plurality recognition on self-paced and speeded tests. The familiarity of test items was enhanced by presenting a prime that matched the subsequent test item. On item and plurality recognition tests, participants were more likely to respond "old" to primed than to unprimed test items. In associative recognition, priming increased the proportion of old responses on a speeded test, but not on a self-paced test. This suggests that familiarity plays a larger role in item and plurality recognition than in associative recognition on self-paced tests. On speeded tests, priming has a similar effect on item, associative, and plurality recognition. Results suggest that item and associative recognition rely differentially on familiarity and recollection. They are also consistent with recent evidence suggesting that different processes underlie plurality and associative recognition.

In five experiments, participants studied pairs of words and yes/no recognition memory for both item and associative information was tested. Two stimulus manipulations, nouns versus nonnouns and high versus low word concreteness, produced the mirror effect for both item and associative recognition. The mirror effect was reflected in both measures of accuracy and response latency. A word frequency manipulation, however, produced the mirror effect only for item recognition. Two additional experiments showed that the mirror effect could also be obtained between nouns and nonnouns and between high and low concrete words for associative recognition in a forced-choice recognition procedure. The results extend the generality of the mirror effect to measures of response latency and to associative recognition and also suggest that similar retrieval and decision processes underlie recognition of item and associative information.

Previous work (Mayes et al., Hippocampus 12:325-340, 2002) found that patient YR, who suffered a selective bilateral lesion to the hippocampus in 1986, showed relatively preserved verbal and visual item recognition memory in the face of clearly impaired verbal and visual recall. In this study, we found that YR's Yes/No as well as forced-choice recognition of both intra-item associations and associations between items of the same kind was as well preserved as her item recognition memory. In contrast, YR was clearly impaired, and more so than she was on the above kinds of recognition, at recognition of associations between different kinds of information. Thus, her recognition memory for associations between objects and their locations, words and their temporal positions, abstract visual items or words and their temporal order, animal pictures and names of professions, faces and voices, faces and spoken names, words and definitions, and pictures and sounds, was clearly impaired. Several of the different information associative recognition tests at which YR was impaired could be compared with related item or inter-item association recognition tests of similar difficulty that she performed relatively normally around the same time. It is suggested that YR's familiarity memory for items, intra-item associations, and associations between items of the same kind was mediated by her intact medial temporal lobe cortices and was preserved, whereas her hippocampally mediated recall/recollection of these kinds of information was impaired. It is also suggested that the components of associations between different kinds of information are represented in distinct neocortical regions and that initially they only converge for memory processing within the hippocampus. No familiarity memory may exist in normal subjects for such associations, and, if so, YR's often chance recognition occurred because of her severe recall/recollection deficit. Conflicting data and views are discussed, and the way in which recall as well as item and associative recognition need to be systematically explored in patients with apparently selective hippocampal lesions, in order to resolve existing conflicts, is outlined.

Encoding time and the mirror effect in recognition memory: Evidence from eyetracking

Aging and IQ effects on associative recognition and priming in item recognition

Episodic memory comprises memory for individual information units (item memory) and for the connections among them (associative memory). In two experiments using an object pair learning task, we examined the effect of visual stimulus complexity on memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms and on item and associative memory performance. Subjects encoded pairs of black monochrome object images (low complexity, LC condition) or color photographs of objects (high complexity, HC condition) via interactive imagery, and subsequently item and associative recognition were tested. In Experiment 1, event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed an enhanced frontal N2 during encoding and an enhanced late posterior negativity (LPN) during item recognition in the HC condition, suggesting that memory traces containing visually more complex objects elicited a stronger effort in reconstructing the past episode. Item memory was consistently superior in the HC compared to the LC condition. Associative memory was either statistically unaffected by complexity (Experiment 1) or improved (Experiment 2) in the HC condition, speaking against a tradeoff between resources allocated to item versus associative memory, and hence contradicting results of some prior studies. In Experiment 2, in both young and older adults, both item and associative memory benefitted from stimulus complexity, such that the magnitude of the age-related associative deficit was not influenced by stimulus complexity. Together, these results suggest that if familiar objects are presented in a form that exhibits a higher visual complexity, which may support semantic processing, complexity can benefit both item and associative memory. Stimulus properties that enhance item memory can scaffold associative memory in this situation.

The neural substrates of associative and item priming and recognition were investigated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study over two separate sessions. In the priming session, participants decided which object of a pair was bigger during both study and test phases. In the recognition session, participants saw different object pairs and performed the same size-judgement task followed by an associative recognition memory task. Associative priming was accompanied by reduced activity in the right middle occipital gyrus as well as in bilateral hippocampus. Object item priming was accompanied by reduced activity in extensive priming-related areas in the bilateral occipitotemporofrontal cortex, as well as in the perirhinal cortex, but not in the hippocampus. Associative recognition was characterized by activity increases in regions linked to recollection, such as the hippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex, anterior medial frontal gyrus and posterior parahippocampal cortex. Item object priming and recognition recruited broadly overlapping regions (e.g., bilateral middle occipital and prefrontal cortices, left fusiform gyrus), even though the BOLD response was in opposite directions. These regions along with the precuneus, where both item priming and recognition were accompanied by activation, have been found to respond to object familiarity. The minimal structural overlap between object associative priming and recollection-based associative recognition suggests that they depend on largely different stimulus-related information and that the different directions of the effects indicate distinct retrieval mechanisms. In contrast, item priming and familiarity-based recognition seemed mainly based on common memory information, although the extent of common processing between priming and familiarity remains unclear. Further implications of these findings are discussed.

Two reasons may explain the discrepant findings regarding declarative memory in developmental language disorder (DLD) in the literature. First, standardized tests are one of the primary tools used to assess declarative memory in previous studies. It is possible they are not sensitive enough to subtle memory impairment. Second, the system underlying declarative memory is complex, and thus results may vary depending on the types of encoding and retrieval processes measured (e.g., item specific or relational) and/or task demands (e.g., recall or recognition during memory retrieval). To adopt an experimental paradigm to examine episodic memory functioning in adolescents with and without DLD, with the focus on memory recognition of item-specific and relational information. Two groups of adolescents, one with DLD (n = 23; mean age = 16.73 years) and the other without (n = 23; mean age = 16.75 years), participated in the study. The Relational and Item-Specific Encoding (RISE) paradigm was used to assess the effect of different encoding processes on episodic memory retrieval in DLD. The advantage of using the RISE task is that both item-specific and relational encoding/retrieval can be examined within the same learning paradigm. Adolescents with DLD and those with typical language development showed comparable engagement during the encoding phase. The DLD group showed significantly poorer item recognition than the comparison group. Associative recognition was not significantly different between the two groups; however, there was a non-significant trend for to be poorer in the DLD group than in the comparison group, suggesting a possible impairment in associative recognition in individuals with DLD, but to a lesser magnitude. These results indicate that adolescents with DLD have difficulty with episodic memory retrieval when stimuli are encoded and retrieved without support from contextual information. Associative recognition is relatively less affected than item recognition in adolescents with DLD.

The ring of familiarity: False familiarity due to rhyming primes in item and associative recognition

Chinese character unitization enhances item memory in addition to associative memory: Evidence from ERP and TFR

The present study examined how aging influences item and associative recognition memory, and compared memory for two types of associations: associations between the same kinds of information and associations between different kinds of information. A group of young adults and a group of older adults performed a forced-choice face recognition task and two multitrial forced-choice associative recognition tasks, assessing memory for face-face and face-spatial location associations. The results showed disproportionate age-related decline of associative recognition compared to intact item recognition. Moreover, aging affected both types of associative tasks in the same way. The findings support an associative deficit hypothesis (Naveh-Benjamin, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 1170–1187, 2000), which attributes a substantial part of the age effect on episodic memory tasks to difficulty with binding individual components into a cohesive memory trace. This associative deficit seems to affect same-information associations, as well as different-information associations.

Advanced age is associated with decrements in episodic memory, which are more pronounced in memory for associations than for individual items. The associative deficit hypothesis (ADH) states that age differences in recognition memory reflect difficulty in binding components of a memory episode and retrieving bound units. To date, ADH has received support only in studies of extreme age groups, and the influence of sex, education, and health on age-related associative deficit is unknown. We address those issues using a verbal paired-associate yes-no recognition paradigm on a lifespan sample of 278 healthy, well-educated adults. In accord with the ADH, greater age was associated with lower hit and greater false alarm rates and more liberal response bias on associative recognition tests. Women outperformed men on recognition of items and associations, but among normotensive participants, women outperformed men only on memory for associations and not on item recognition. Thus, although supporting ADH in a large lifespan sample of healthy adults, the findings indicate that the effect may be partially driven by an age-related increase in liberal bias in recognition of associations. Sex differences and health factors may modify the associative deficit regardless of age.

This paper presents an implementation of simple Artificial Neural Network model and multilevel of Discrete Wavelet Transform as feature extractions, which is achieved to increase the high recognition rates up to 95 % instead of Short-time Fourier Transform in the conversation background noises at noises up to 65 dB. The performance evaluation has been demonstrated in terms of correct recognition rate, maximum noise power of interfering sounds, hit rates, false alarm rates and miss rates. The proposed method offers a potential alternative to intelligence voice recognition system in speech analysis-synthesis and recognition applications.

Wireless sensor network refers to a group of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors for monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the environment and organizing the collected data at a central location. The current abnormal wireless sensor network vehicle load data recognition method is more complex, which leads to low recognition rate, false alarm rate and slow recognition speed. Based on the genetic algorithm, the accurate method for abnormal wireless sensor network vehicle load data recognition is proposed. The effective feature set of abnormal vehicle load data in the wireless sensor network is constructed, to remove irrelevant features and redundant features from existing abnormal wireless sensor network vehicle load data. The abnormal wireless sensor network vehicle load data in the effective feature set are coded, to reduce the recognition time of abnormal wireless sensor network vehicle load data. The adaptive fitness function, crossover operator and mutation operator are applied to genetic algorithm, which can improve the recognition rate, reduce the false alarm rate, and realize the recognition of abnormal vehicle load data wireless sensor network. The experimental results show that the recognition rate of this method is high, the false alarm rate is low, and the time of recognition is less.

Research suggests that metacognitive monitoring ability does not decline with age. For example, judgments-of-learning (JOL) accuracy is roughly equivalent between younger and older adults. But few studies have asked whether younger and older adults’ metacognitive ability varies across different types of memory processes (e.g., for items vs. pairs). The current study tested the relationship between memory and post-decision confidence ratings at the trial level on item (individual words) and associative (word pairs) memory recognition tests. As predicted, younger and older adults had similar metacognitive efficiency, when using meta-d’/d’, a measure derived from Signal Detection Theory, despite a significant age effect favoring younger adults on memory performance. This result is consistent with previous work showing age-equivalent metacognitive efficiency in the memory domain. We also found that metacognitive efficiency was higher for associative memory than for item memory across age groups, even though associative and item recognition memory (d’) were statistically equivalent. Higher accuracy on post-test decision confidence ratings for associative recognition relative to item recognition on resolution accuracy itself (meta-d’) and when corrected for performance differences (meta-d’/d’) are novel findings. Implications for associative metacognition are discussed.