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.
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.
Performance in both recollection tasks was also compared against performance in the Control task.
Recollection accuracy (proportions of responses attributing items to the correct source) and reaction times for the scanned retrieval task are displayed in Table 1.
As a particular application, a recognition memory task is studied and the design matrix optimized for contrasts involving the familiarity of individual items (pictures of objects) and the recollection of qualitative information associated with the items (left/right orientation).
Second, conceptual self > other differences in the ventral mPFC were only found during the conceptual recollection task and not during the agentic recollection task, suggesting that the self-referential process mediated by this region was not automatically elicited, but rather was flexibly engaged based on task demands.
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 study used the criterial recollection task to revisit the question of whether patients with frontal lobe lesions are able to use a distinctiveness heuristic.
By comparison, there was no significant relationship between the similarity measure and performance on the Agentic recollection task (r(16) = −0.15, P = 0.56).
