Effects of multiple study-test repetition on the neural correlates of recognition memory: ERPs dissociate remembering and knowing

Event-related potential (ERP) frontal (300-500 ms) and parietal (500-700 ms) episodic memory (EM) effects are thought to reflect, respectively, familiarity and recollection. However, as most ERP studies use preexperimentally familiar items, an alternative idea is that the frontal EM effect reflects conceptual priming. Repetition of unnameable symbols was used to assess modulations of the putative ERP indices of familiarity and recollection. The same symbols were viewed in each of 4 study/test blocks. Increases in familiarity and conceptual processing of symbols did not modulate the frontal EM effect, suggesting that it reflects neither familiarity nor conceptual priming. The magnitude of the parietal EM effect increased and its onset latency decreased across tests for items given remember (R) but not know (K) judgments. R and K old-new topographies differed. These findings support dual-process proposals that familiarity- and recollection-based processes are distinct.