Sr. Rubin et al., Memory conjunction errors in younger and older adults: Event-related potential and neuropsychological data, COGN NEUROP, 16(3-5), 1999, pp. 459-488
In a study/recognition paradigm, new words at test were recombinations of s
tudied syllables (e.g. BARLEY from BARTER and VALLEY), shared one syllable
with studied words, or were completely new. False alarm rates followed the
gradient of similarity with studied items. Event-related potentials to the
three classes of false alarms were indistinguishable. False alarms elicited
different brain activity than did hits, arguing against the idea that conj
unction errors occur during encoding and are later retrieved liked genuine
memories. In Experiment 2, with healthy older adults, neuropsychological te
sts sensitive to frontal lobe function predicted false alarm rate, but not
hit rate. Performance on standardised memory scales sensitive to medial tem
poral/diencephalic function influenced the pattern of false alarm rates acr
oss the three classes of new words. The experiments suggest that false alar
ms to conjunction lures are not similar to true recollections, but are prod
ucts of faulty monitoring at retrieval.