Interestingly, performance on the conceptual recollection task was weaker for participants who rated themselves as more similar to Obama, replicating previous research (Benoit et al. 2010).
You- and Obama-related items in the Conceptual recollection task were also not significantly different for source accuracy (t < 1, ns), but You items were associated with significantly shorter RTs (t(17) = 4.52, P = 0.0003) and higher Confidence (t(17) = 4.12, P = 0.0007) than Obama items.
A subsequent recognition test for new items that had been presented during the recollection task found that conceptual and agentic recollection attempts resulted in differential incidental encoding of new information.
The present results extend the findings of intact source memory for visually presented word and face stimuli to an auditory source recollection task involving discrimination between different voices, and demonstrate that the previous results in patients with unilateral lesions cannot be attributed to possible compensation from the patients' contralesional parietal lobe.
The present study used the criterial recollection task to revisit the question of whether patients with frontal lobe lesions are able to use a distinctiveness heuristic.
This involved contrasting old words related to the self or Obama (You > Obama) during the Conceptual recollection task, and contrasting old words spoken aloud by the participants or experimenter (Subject > Experimenter) during the Agentic recollection task.
Performance of the patients and matched control participants on the visual source recollection task is shown in Figure 4 b.
We predicted that both types of episodic recollection task would activate dorsal mPFC compared with the nonepisodic control condition, since both episodic tasks involve considering social information.
If this is the case, then introducing a manipulation during the study phase, aimed at reducing the behavioral relevance of mnemonic information key to the source recollection task, might result in impaired subsequent recollection performance in patients with parietal lesions.
When participants were asked to retrieve whether they had related a person-descriptive word to themselves or another person, ventral mPFC was particularly engaged for items that had been encoded in relation to their concept of self compared with the concept of another person, but no similar conceptual self > other difference was found in the agentic recollection task.
