Axel Mecklinger

Experimentel Neuropsychology Unit

Department of Psychologie

Saarland University

The retrieval of inter-item and intra-item associations

Experimental Neuropsychology Unit

• Neurocognition of Learning

• Memory and Emotion

• Binding Mechanisms

• Memory in Early Childhood

• Cerebrovascular Dementia

• EEG / ERP • fMRI / Patient studies

http://www.neuro.psychologie.uni-saarland.de

Experimental Neuropsychology Unit

Binding in Human Memory:

• Binding of Emotional Stimuli

• Binding and Familiarity

• Associational vs Relational Binding

Research Group 448: Germany Research Society

Memory Binding

• The hippocampus plays an important role in memory binding.

- sparse representations /

- pattern separation - pattern completion

Norman and O`Reilly (2003)

Binding and the Hippocampus

• Research supporting the recollection hypothesis of the parietal old/new (EM) effects can be conceptualized as requiring binding:

- Source Memory (Wilding & Rugg, 1996; Trott et al. 1997)

- Associative Recognition (Donaldson & Rugg, 1998)

Neuroanatomical Considerations

The perirhinal cortex is a multimodal association area!

Suzuki (1996)

Psychological Considerations

• Familiarity is contextually insensitive. Atkinson and Juola, (1974); Mandler, (1980)

• Familiarity tracks the global match (similiarity) between a test probe and a study item.Norman and O‘Reilly (2003); Hintzman (1988)

Support for the Contextual Insensitivity Account:

• Tsivilis et al. (2001) • König, Mecklinger, Paller (2005)

Associative recognition with maintained and rearranged feature combinations.

The mid-frontal old/new effect is not sensitive to associative

variation.

Maintained vs Rearrangement Face- Occupation pairings

Tsivilis et al (2001)

Maintained vs Rearrangement Face- Occupation pairings

König, Mecklinger & Paller (2005)

newsame3same1rearranged3rearranged1

But ...

Associative effects on familiarity could

depend on the ease with which the

to-be-associated information can be

encoded as a single unitized representation.

Intra-item binding: Easy unitisation

Yonelinas et al, (1999)

Probing the Sensitivity of Familiarity to Associations

• Emotionally valenced spoken words

- Easy unitization: Congruent intonation - Difficult unitization: Neutral intonation

H: Familiarity is capable of binding congruent valence-intonation pairs to create a new episodic representation:

Frontal old/new effect: congruent > neutral

Gender Differences in the Processing of Emotional Prosody

“Men don‘t really understand !

There are pronounced gender differences in the time courseof processing emotional prosody“

Short ISI Long ISI

Schirmer et al. (2002, 2003)

Experimental Design

Participants- N=30 [16 female] - Age: 21-30, Ø 24,7- Reading span [0-6]: Male: 3,7; Female: 3,9

Material- 144 words [72 positive, 72 negative]- Spoken in CONGRUENT or NEUTRAL Prosody by male and female speakers

Study Phase: Auditive - 72 words [36 pos, 36 neg] – each 18 congruent, 18 neutral prosody – each 9 male,

9 female

Test Phase: Visual - 144 words: 72 old [36 congruent, 36 neutral], 72 new

EEG recording- 58 electrodes [250 Hz sampling rate]- Reference nose tip

Mecklinger et al (in prep)

StudyStudy

Task: Task: Remember word and prosody!

+

ITI

200 ms

1500 ms

2000 ms

+

„„ausgelacht“ausgelacht“

Experimental Design

TestTest

+

Source Task: Source Task: ”congruent“ vs. “neutral”

prosody during study

200 ms

300 ms

300 ms

1200 ms

2000 ms

2.Response Window/ITI

ausgelachtausgelacht

1. Response Window

Old/newOld/new

judgmentjudgment

SourceSource

judgmentjudgment

Experimental Design

Behavioral Data

Item Pr

0,0

0,2

0,4

0,6

0,8

1,0

male female

neutral

congruent

Source Performance

0,0

0,2

0,4

0,6

0,8

1,0

male female

Co

rrec

t re

spo

nse

s

neutral

congruent

Item memory is better for congruent than for neutral wordsSource memory: Females outperform males !

ERPs: Source Memory

LPN for neutral and congruent words; Posterior maximum &left lateralization. No gender effects

ERPs: Source Memory: Males

400-600 ms: Neutral > new (parietal and parieto-occipital sites)

ERPs: Source Memory: Females

400-600 ms: Neutral > new, congruent > new600-700 ms: Congruent > neutral

Sensitivity of Familiarity to Associations?

Females: 250-400 ms: congruent > neutral (p<.10)

Effects of Emotion

400 – 700 ms: negative > positive (left and mid parieto-occipital sites). No gender effects.

Are males less able to discriminateemotional prosody?

• Follow up study: Classification of intonation: Congruent or neutral?

• 12 male and 12 female participants.

Mecklinger et al. (in prep)

Are males less able to discriminateemotional prosody?

Performance

0,0

0,1

0,2

0,3

0,4

0,5

0,6

0,7

0,8

0,9

1,0

male female

Co

rre

ct

Re

sp

on

se

s

neutral

congruent

Reaction Times (correct responses)

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

male female

Tim

e neutral

congruent

RTs faster for neutral than for congruent words but:

No gender differences in prosody discrimination !

• Partial support for the view that familiarity is sensitive to assosiations in case of easy-to associate features (congruent valence – intonation pairs) in females.

• Females show better source memory for easy- (and difficult) to-associate features. They are better capable to unitize features to create a single episodic represenations (at least with emotional prosody).

• Though no gender differences in item memory and emotional processing were obtained, males seem to have problems in binding auditory – verbal features in episodic memory.

Conclusions

Experimental Neuropsychology Unit

• Mikael Johansson

• Anne-Cecile Treese

• Annett Schimer

• Andrea Gäbel

http://www.neuro.psychologie.uni-saarland.de