It has been consistently described in the literature that in contrast to recollection processes, familiarity processes are relatively unaffected by aging [16], [17], [18].
Modern theories focus on the memory process of familiarity, as distinct from knowing – like when you recognise a face but can't quite place it.
After the visual encoding of the stimuli in occipital regions, three separable memory processes took place: a familiarity process (temporal cortex), a recollection process (temporal cortex and supramarginal gyrus), and a representational process (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex).
Recognition memory relies on two successive and distinct processes, namely familiarity and recollection.
The results indicate interactions appearing in the right hemisphere during the perceptual encoding stage (N170) when subjects processed either familiarity or expression during switched trials.
Recognition can be based on two distinct processes named familiarity and recollection.
In the amnesia literature, disagreement exists over whether anterograde amnesia involves recollective-based recognition processes and/or familiarity-based ones depending on whether the anatomical damage is restricted to the hippocampus or also involves adjacent areas, particularly the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices.
One possibility, consistent with Yonelinas (1994), is that items that are not recollected can be recognized based on a continuous, familiarity process that operates under the assumptions of SDT.
Determining to what extent this familiarity process takes place in the frontal cortical regions would be an interesting future experiment since, in the framework of Bar's model, this may influence the selection of the templates that are used to perform the task.
For example, multidimensional scaling can be used to construct a psychological space in which the proximity of individual stimuli is determined by the subject's similarity judgments (akin to the judgments subjects needed to make in our OOO task) [ 1], but it is unclear how this space could be useful to process or predict familiarity judgments about the same stimuli.
At the neuronal level however, analyses that focused on contextual memory revealed distinct correlations between performance and neuronal activity in frontal areas associated with recollection processes after post-training sleep, and in the parahippocampal gyrus associated with familiarity processes in sleep-deprived participants.
