Age-Related Differences in the Impact of Prior Knowledge on Recognition Performance: A Face Recognition Study.

Background/Study context: The dual-process hypothesis of memory and aging (DPHMA) postulates a decline of recollection with no decline in recognition. While the age-related recollection deficit is well-documented, any age-changes in the familiarity process remain unclear. Some studies have shown that familiar and meaningful material can enhance the recognition performance of older adults. The goal of the present study was to explore the impact of familiar material on age-related recognition-memory decline, using a dual-process approach. METHODS: One hundred participants (50 young adults and 50 older adults) performed two recognition tasks using an unfamiliar and a famous face recognition task. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was used to examine the memory processes underlying recognition memory. RESULTS: The older adults showed lower performance on recognition accuracy and false alarms rate, only in the unfamiliar-face recognition task. A DPHMA-like pattern on unfamiliar-face recognition task was obtained. Prior knowledge in the famous-face recognition task improved recollection for older adults and no age-related deficit was found. CONCLUSION: The present study suggests that episodic memory deficits in healthy aging are primarily driven by a recollection deficit while familiarity is relatively well spared. However, this age-related recollection deficit could be alleviated using knowledge-based material.

Format change and semantic relatedness effects on the ERP correlates of recognition: old pairs, new pairs, different stories.

In this event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated the effects of format change and semantic relatedness in a recognition task using pairs composed of a word and a line drawing. The semantic relatedness of the pairs (related: rabbit-carrot; unrelated: duck-artichoke) influenced their associative properties and corresponding distinctiveness, while format change refers to the switching of an item from the verbal form to the line drawing form between study and recognition (e.g., the word "egg" is associated with a drawing of a hen at study, and a line drawing of an egg is associated with the word "hen" at test). Study-test format change thus prevents visual matching while maintaining conceptual matching. While the N300 potential was only modulated by the semantic relatedness of the pair, both factors modulated recognition performance and corresponding ERP old/new effects with larger mid-frontal N400 old/new effect (300-500 ms) and larger parietal old/new effect (500-800 ms) in the same compared to the different-format condition, as well as for related compared to unrelated pairs. Furthermore, the semantic relatedness of correctly recognized old pairs modulated the anterior N400 while it modulated the posterior N400 for correctly rejected pairs. These results suggest that semantic relatedness and familiarity related to the amount of change between study and test present distinct ERP signatures in the N400 window. They suggest also that the distinctiveness and the ease of the retrieval of the pair could be determining for the parietal old/new effect.

Face recognition in schizophrenia: do individual and average ROCs tell the same story?

INTRODUCTION: Many studies have shown that recollection process is impaired in patients with schizophrenia, whereas familiarity is generally spared. However, in these studies, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) presented is average ROC likely to mask individual differences. METHODS: In the present study using a face-recognition task, we computed the individual ROC of patients with schizophrenia and control participants. Each group was divided into two subgroups on the basis of the type of recognition processes implemented: recognition based on familiarity only and recognition based on familiarity and recollection. RESULTS: The recognition performance of the schizophrenia patients was below that of the control participants only when recognition was based solely on familiarity. For the familiarity-alone patients, the score obtained on the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) was correlated with the variance of the old-face familiarity. For the familiarity-recollection patients, the score obtained on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) was correlated with the decision criterion and with the old-face recollection probability. CONCLUSIONS: These results show that one cannot ascribe the impaired recognition observed in patients with schizophrenia to a recollection deficit alone. These results show that individual ROC can be used to distinguish between subtypes of schizophrenia and could serve as a basis for setting up specific cognitive remediation therapy for individuals with schizophrenia.

The Interaction Between Memory Trace and Memory Judgment in Age-Related Decline.

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Associative memory deficit and executive functioning deficit are two alternative--but nonexclusive--accounts of the episodic memory deficit observed in aging. The first explain the episodic memory decline generally observed in aging by an associative memory deficit (memory decline per se), whereas the second explains it by an executive functioning deficit. This distinction could be critical in early discrimination between healthy aging and very mild Alzheimer's-type dementia. METHODS: Memory performance was measured in older adults (n = 20) and paired younger participants (n = 20), whereas the facial expression and auditory context (spoken voice) associated with the face were manipulated between study and test. Recollection and familiarity were estimated using a remember/know judgment, and source memory performance was obtained depending on the information to retrieve. RESULTS: Although no between-group difference was observed for correctly recognized old faces, older participants made more false alarms than younger ones, thus revealing lower discriminability (d'). Facial expression change decreased recognition for all participants, whereas auditory context change decreased recognition only for younger participants. Remember/know judgments revealed age-related deficits in both recollection and familiarity, the relative decrease in familiarity reported by older adults was particularly large in the expression change conditions, and a disadvantage in source memory performance was particularly pronounced when the task was to retrieve auditory context associated with the face at study. CONCLUSIONS: The present findings show that age-related associative memory differences occur with familiarity as well as recollection and are observed in situations that do not necessarily require conscious retrieval. This age-related decline is more prominent for multimodal (face-auditory context) than for intraitem (face-expression) associations. The value of exploring both memory trace and memory judgment was discussed, and potential applications for the development of neuropsychological tools for memory assessment in aging were highlighted.

Impact of intention on the ERP correlates of face recognition.

The present study investigated the impact of study-test similarity on face recognition by manipulating, in the same experiment, the expression change (same vs. different) and the task-processing context (inclusion vs. exclusion instructions) as within-subject variables. Consistent with the dual-process framework, the present results showed that participants performed better on the inclusion task than on the exclusion task, with no response bias. A mid-frontal FN400 old/new effect and a parietal old/new effect were found in both tasks. However, modulations of the ERP old/new effects generated by the expression change on recognized faces differed across tasks. The modulations of the ERP old/new effects were proportional to the degree of matching between the study face and the recognition face in the inclusion task, but not in the exclusion task. The observed modulation of the FN400 old/new effect by the task instructions when familiarity and conceptual priming were kept constant indicates that these early ERP correlates of recognition depend on voluntary task-related control. The present results question the idea that FN400 reflects implicit memory processes such as conceptual priming and show that the extent to which the FN400 discriminates between conditions depends on the retrieval orientation at test. They are discussed in relation to recent controversies about the ERP correlates of familiarity in face recognition. This study suggests that while both conceptual and perceptual information can contribute to the familiarity signal reflected by the FN400 effect, their relative contributions vary with the task demands.

Impairment not only in remembering but also in knowing previously seen faces and words in schizophrenia.

Patients with schizophrenia have pronounced deficits in face recognition memory that severely hamper their social skills. The functional mechanisms of these impairments remain unknown. According to the dual-process theory, recognition memory comprises two distinct components: recollection and familiarity. Studies using the Remember/Know procedure in patients with schizophrenia showed impairments in conscious recollection as measured by remember responses, but not in familiarity as measured by know responses. Unfortunately, none of these studies used face material. We investigated both recognition memory components using words and faces and the 'Remember/Know' procedure in 25 patients with schizophrenia and 24 control participants. In the same task, size congruency of stimuli was manipulated between the study and test phases to have a selective impact on know responses for faces. Patients reported fewer remember responses than controls. Size changes between the study and the test affected know responses in controls but not in patients. These results reveal that patients with schizophrenia are impaired in terms of their ability to recollect details about previously seen faces as they are for words.

Recollection and familiarity in schizophrenia:An ERP investigation using face recognition exclusion tasks.

Recent studies suggest that the recollection deficit observed in schizophrenia may not be a unitary phenomenon but could depend on the information to retrieve. Here we investigated whether the nature of the perceptual information affects recollection and familiarity in schizophrenia. ERP old/new effects were explored in 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls during unfamiliar face exclusion tasks, with either intrinsic (expression) or extrinsic (background) information either changing or remaining the same between study and test. Schizophrenia patients rejected old faces as distractors in a greater extent than healthy controls. The FN400 old/new effect (300-500ms) was found in both groups. It was sensitive to facial expression change for healthy controls but not schizophrenia patients. In addition, the parietal old/new effect was lower for correctly excluded faces for patients, but not for controls. This points to the conclusion that schizophrenia patients discriminate between target and non-target faces on the basis of the memory strength signal corresponding to the study-test mismatch rather than the recollection of the critical information, as observed in healthy controls. This functioning can be useful when study-test perceptual mismatch must be detected but, in return, can lead to the over-exclusion of old stimuli.

Verbatim and gist memory in aging.

The ability to remember episodic details of prior events declines with normal aging. The present study aimed to determine whether these declines are restricted to verbatim traces of items per se or extend to gist traces of their meaning. Younger (n = 63) and older adults (n = 46) studied a list including related (strong gist activation) and unrelated words (weak gist activation) and performed a recognition test consisting of targets, related distractors, and unrelated distractors. Gist memory increased from the strong relative to the weak gist condition in both age groups. Whereas both younger and older adults could retrieve gist traces of the targeted words, older adults were impaired in their ability to retrieve their verbatim traces, resulting in increased false recognition of the related distractors. These findings suggest an age-related decrease in the ability to retrieve verbatim details of the past episodes accompanied by an increase in reliance on gist memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

An ERP investigation of item-scene incongruity at encoding on subsequent recognition.

The aim of the present study was to investigate how item-scene incongruity at encoding influences subsequent item recognition and the associated event-related potential (ERP) old/new effects. Participants (N = 26) studied pictures showing an item in a scene, either in a congruent condition (e.g., a tent in a field) or an incongruent condition (e.g., a shower cabin in a field). Items were presented alone at test. Behavioral data revealed a benefit of incongruent information, with greater source memory performance but no significant effect on old/new recognition judgments. Longer response times for old compared to new items showed that participants not only evaluated the old-new status of objects during recognition, but also worked already on the scene context decision relative to the source memory judgment. An ERP incongruity effect was found at study, with greater N400 amplitude in the incongruent condition than the congruent condition. During recognition, the results provide evidence that item-scene incongruity at study increases the amplitude of ERP old/new effects. A mid-frontal N400 old/new effect was found in the early time window (300-500 ms), and a right frontal sub-component was modulated by item-scene incongruity at encoding. The modulation observed in the later time window (500-800 ms) confirmed previous studies showing that the parietal old/new effect reflects the retrieval of episodic contextual details. The present study shows that the magnitude of ERP old/new effects is sensitive to item-scene incongruity at encoding from the early time window in the right frontal region to the later retrieval processes.

Use of the process dissociation procedure to study the contextual effects on face recognition in schizophrenia: familiarity, associative recollection and discriminative recollection.

Contextual effects were explored in schizophrenia patients and paired comparison subjects during a long-term face recognition task. The objective was to investigate the contextual effects on face recognition by manipulating, in the same experiment, the perceptual context of the face (intrinsic vs. extrinsic) and the task context (inclusion vs. exclusion instructions). The situation was derived from the Jacoby's [Jacoby, L.L., 1991. A process dissociation framework: separating automatic from intentional uses of memory. Journal of Memory and Language 30, 513-541] process dissociation procedure. The results showed that schizophrenia patients (N=20) presented lower performances than healthy controls (N=20) in the inclusion but not in the exclusion task. This observation emphasizes the heterogeneity of recollection and suggests that the memory impairment in schizophrenia reflects an imbalance between two mechanisms. The first is a deficit in "associative recollection", i.e., the failure to use efficiently associative information. The other is an enhanced "discriminative recollection" that impedes their capacity to process information separately from its perceptual context. In addition, correlation with symptoms suggest that the former is expressed in the loosening of associations characteristic of disorganization symptoms, whereas the latter reflects the lack of flexibility or the contextualization bias related to psychotic symptoms, i.e., delusions and hallucinations.

Electrophysiological study of contextual variations in a short-term face recognition task.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during two short-term recognition tasks using unfamiliar faces. These experiments are based on the process dissociation procedure (PDP), whereby the exclusion criterion was an intrinsic context or extrinsic context, the facial expression (Experiment 1) or background (Experiment 2), respectively. The results indicate that retrieval orientation, in addition to extensive strategic control, affects both the frontal (N250) and temporoparietal (P3b) components. Furthermore, these data indicate that an early frontal modulation interacts between processing that bears on the face (interactive intrinsic context) and processing that bears on two objects at the same time (interactive extrinsic context), in which, in the latter case, that the background change led to an early modulation at the frontal sites in the left hemisphere. These results are consistent with the idea that frontal effects reflect differences in the nature of the information during retrieval and postretrieval processes involved. Furthermore, that the left posterior repetition effect appears to be a manifestation of the retrieval of relevant contextual information that perturbs the recognition decision, whereas the right posterior repetition effect reflects to be the outcome of the retrieval of the face as a whole. Finally, results are in concordance with the hypothesis that the difference during recognition with or without source memory may be in the strength of the relationship between the target and the contextual information to be retrieved. In essence, that automatic and controlled processes in a given context depends on both task-related and target-related constraints.

Target-context unitization effect on the familiarity-related FN400: a face recognition exclusion task.

Using two exclusion tasks, the present study examined how the ERP correlates of face recognition are affected by the nature of the information to be retrieved. Intrinsic (facial expression) and extrinsic (background scene) visual information were paired with face identity and constituted the exclusion criterion at test time. Although perceptual information had to be taken into account in both situations, the FN400 old-new effect was observed only for old target faces on the expression-exclusion task, whereas it was found for both old target and old non-target faces in the background-exclusion situation. These results reveal that the FN400, which is generally interpreted as a correlate of familiarity, was modulated by the retrieval of intra-item and intrinsic face information, but not by the retrieval of extrinsic information. The observed effects on the FN400 depended on the nature of the information to be retrieved and its relationship (unitization) to the recognition target. On the other hand, the parietal old-new effect (generally described as an ERP correlate of recollection) reflected the retrieval of both types of contextual features equivalently. The current findings are discussed in relation to recent controversies about the nature of the recognition processes reflected by the ERP correlates of face recognition.

Perceptually or conceptually driven recognition: on the specificities of the memory deficit in schizophrenia.

This study explored the effects of exemplar changes on visual object recognition in patients with schizophrenia and paired control subjects. The experimental design was derived from the process-dissociation procedure (PDP: Jacoby, 1991). The objects presented at test could be the same exemplar as at study (physically identical picture), a different exemplar of the same object category, or a new, non-studied object. In the inclusion task, participants had to generalize their recognition to the conceptual level by accepting both different and identical exemplars as old. In the exclusion task, on the other hand, they had to accept only the same exemplars of the studied objects as old. Overall, performance was better on the inclusion task than on the exclusion task; schizophrenia patients performed worse than controls on the inclusion task but not the exclusion task, misrecognizing different exemplars more often than healthy controls. The present findings reveal that both recollection and familiarity are impaired in patients with schizophrenia, who present a relational, conceptually driven memory deficit. This deficit does not allow them to recognize an object as a member of a specific category independently of perceptual variations. This retrieval mode influences their subjective awareness of items׳ familiarity, and should be considered as a target for remediation.

Relation between facial affect recognition and configural face processing in antipsychotic-free schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: Deficit in facial affect recognition is a well-documented impairment in schizophrenia, closely connected to social outcome. This deficit could be related to psychopathology, but also to a broader dysfunction in processing facial information. In addition, patients with schizophrenia inadequately use configural information-a type of processing that relies on spatial relationships between facial features. To date, no study has specifically examined the link between symptoms and misuse of configural information in the deficit in facial affect recognition. METHOD: Unmedicated schizophrenia patients (n = 30) and matched healthy controls (n = 30) performed a facial affect recognition task and a face inversion task, which tests aptitude to rely on configural information. In patients, regressions were carried out between facial affect recognition, symptom dimensions and inversion effect. RESULTS: Patients, compared with controls, showed a deficit in facial affect recognition and a lower inversion effect. Negative symptoms and lower inversion effect could account for 41.2% of the variance in facial affect recognition. CONCLUSION: This study confirms the presence of a deficit in facial affect recognition, and also of dysfunctional manipulation in configural information in antipsychotic-free patients. Negative symptoms and poor processing of configural information explained a substantial part of the deficient recognition of facial affect. We speculate that this deficit may be caused by several factors, among which independently stand psychopathology and failure in correctly manipulating configural information.

Mismatched expressions decrease face recognition and corresponding ERP old/new effects in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: The objective was to investigate the electrophysiological (ERP) correlates of mismatched expression on face recognition in schizophrenia. METHOD: Expression-change effects and associated ERPs were explored in patients with schizophrenia (n = 20) and paired comparison participants (n = 20) on a long-term face-recognition task. RESULTS: A facial-expression change decreased discriminability for patients with schizophrenia than for healthy participants. The patients' recognition deficit was accompanied by the absence of the midfrontal FN400 and late parietal ERP old/new effects in the mismatched-expression condition. By contrast, preserved midfrontal FN400 and late parietal ERP old/new effects were found in both groups in the unchanged-expression condition. Thus, the preserved parietal old/new effect previously observed in schizophrenia was no longer found here in the situation in which expression changes took place between the study and recognition phases. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that, when they are not supposed to take the change of expression into account, the recognition deficit observed here in patients with schizophrenia resulted from an impairment in the mechanisms underlying the emergence, assessment, or utilization of familiarity--as indexed by the ERP old/new effects. In these natural conditions, the impact of the expression change on the implementation of retrieval processes offers new insight into schizophrenia-linked deficits in face recognition, with substantial phenomenological differences with respect to the emergence of familiarity.

ERP investigation of study-test background mismatch during face recognition in schizophrenia.

Old/new effects on event-related potentials (ERP) were explored in 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 paired comparison subjects during unfamiliar face recognition. Extrinsic perceptual changes - which influence the overall familiarity of an item while retaining face-intrinsic features for use in structural face encoding - were manipulated between the study phase and the test. The question raised here concerns whether these perceptual incongruities would have a different effect on the sense of familiarity and the corresponding behavioral and ERP measures in the two groups. The results showed that schizophrenia patients were more inclined to consider old faces shown against a new background as distractors. This drop in face familiarity was accompanied by the disappearance of ERP old/new effects in this condition, i.e., FN400 and parietal old/new effects. Indeed, while ERP old/new recognition effects were found in both groups when the picture of the face was physically identical to the one presented for study, the ERP correlates of recognition disappeared among patients when the background behind the face was different. This difficulty in disregarding a background change suggests that recognition among patients with schizophrenia is based on a global perceptual matching strategy rather than on the extraction of configural information from the face. The correlations observed between FN400 amplitude, the rejection of faces with a different background, and the reality-distortion scores support the idea that the recognition deficit found in schizophrenia results from early anomalies that are carried over onto the parietal ERP old/new effect. Face-extrinsic perceptual variations provide an opportune situation for gaining insight into the social difficulties that patients encounter throughout their lives.