The relationship between cortical reinstatement of scene information and memory accuracy

Poster Session E - Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Ambereen Kidwai¹ (amber.kidwai@utdallas.edu), Sabina Srokova², Michael D. Rugg¹; ¹University of Texas at Dallas, ²University of Arizona

Previous fMRI research contrasting retrieval-related scene reinstatement in adults with developmental amnesia and healthy controls identified reinstatement effects of equal strength in the two groups, despite dramatic behavioral differences in scene memory (Elward et al., 2021). Motivated by this striking finding, here we employed fMRI to examine scene reinstatement in healthy young adults when reinstatement effects were elicited by test items associated with accurate scene retrieval as opposed to when effects were estimated regardless of retrieval accuracy. 24 young adults (aged 18-29 years) first studied words overlaid on a scene, an object or a scrambled image. The word-image pairs were presented on either the left or right side of the display. In a subsequent scanned test phase, participants were presented with previously studied words along with new words. In the retrieval task of interest here, for those words identified as previously studied, participants judged whether the image associated with the word at study was a scene, an object or a scrambled image. Scene reinstatement effects were operationalized as greater retrieval-related activity for words that had been paired with a scene rather than a scrambled image. Relative to reinstatement effects for test items attracting correct source judgments, there was no evidence of a dilution of the effects when test items were unsegregated by accuracy, despite performance that was well below ceiling. This finding adds to the results previously obtained in developmental amnesic participants and suggests that retrieval-related scene reinstatement can occur independently of behavioral evidence that a scene was retrieved.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic