Event-related brain potentials during auditory and visual word recognition memory tasks

Jürgen Kayser, Regan Fong, Craig E. Tenke, Gerald E. Bruder

Department of Biopsychology, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY 10032, USA

Received 26 September 2001; revised 4 April 2001; accepted 31 July 2002. 

Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded during presentation of a series of words or pictures show enhanced positivity between 300 and 800 ms after presentation of repeated items. However, little attention has been directed to the characterization of this ERP recognition memory effect using auditory stimuli. The present study directly compared the ERP 'old/new effect' for words presented in the visual and auditory modalities. Nose- referenced ERPs were recorded from 30 electrode sites while participants (N = 16) were engaged in visual and auditory continuous word recognition memory tasks. Spatially and temporally overlapping ERP components were identified and measured by covariance-based principal components analysis. The expected old/new effect was observed in both modalities, with a comparable time course peaking at 560 ms, but having a more anterior scalp topography for visual items. This suggests a common cognitive process (i.e., successful retrieval of information from memory) associated with separable neural generators in each modality. Despite this temporal synchronization, the cross-modality old/new effect overlapped ERP components having distinct scalp topographies (N2) or peak latencies (P3) for each modality. The positive-going old/new effect was preceded by an earlier negativity peaking at 370 ms that was greater across modalities for old than new words, likely reflecting semantic processing aspects of word recognition memory. A late (beyond 900 ms), broadly distributed negativity was also greater for old than new words, prolonged for auditory items, and may represent activity of a post-retrieval process.

Keywords: memory, ERP event-related potential, recognition memory, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs, Visual and Auditory Modality, Principal Components Analysis