The recollection task used corresponded to that from Experiment 1 except that the study phase did not focus participants' attention specifically towards the gender of the speaker.
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.
Reducing the behavioral relevance of mnemonic information critical to the source recollection task did not affect performance of the bilateral lesion patients, indicating that the previously observed reduced autobiographical free recall might not be due to impaired bottom-up attention.
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.
In particular, we have developed a quantitative recollection task that assesses the ability of human subjects (N = 40) to recollect the factual structure and organization of a structured and fully controlled experience in a human accessible mixed reality space, the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM).
A second analysis separated old items in the Agentic recollection task based on whether the participant had related the word to themselves or Obama.
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).
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.
In fact, both clusters in the You > Obama contrast in the Conceptual recollection task were still significant when exclusively masked with a leniently thresholded (P < 0.05, uncorrected) Subject > Experimenter contrast in the Agentic recollection task, indicating that self > other mPFC activation differences were restricted to conceptual self-referential memories.
