A comprehensive understanding of human memory requires both cognitive and neural descriptions of memory processes along with a conception of how memory processing drives behavioral responses and subjective experiences. Noninvasive neuroimaging techniques have greatly extended our understanding of the functional characteristics of human memory, and how neural events give rise to different memory subtypes. Nonetheless, a great deal of uncertainty has clouded distinctions between hypothesized explicit memory processes termed recollection and familiarity, and a hypothesized implicit memory process termed conceptual priming. In this thesis, I specify this problem via a thorough review of findings from one form of neuroimaging, the recording of event-related brain potentials, and then outline a theoretical stance to justify why delineating these forms of memory has been particularly difficult from a neural perspective. I then present data from four neuroimaging experiments that clarify the neural relationships between these three expressions of memory. These neuroimaging experiments all employ novel behavioral paradigms in which multiple behavioral measures of memory subtypes substantiate the patterns of neuroimaging data, thus allowing valid conclusions to be made regarding the correspondence between behaviorally-indicated memory subtypes and neural measures. Taken together, results from these experiments indicate (1) that conceptual priming and familiarity are distinct forms of memory that are unlikely to result from the same neural processing, and (2) that familiarity and recollection, although phenomenologically distinct, are not qualitatively different in their neural implementation as revealed by electrophysiology, and thus likely reflect varying levels of explicit memory rather than distinct retrieval processes.

Last modified

• 06/05/2018

Creator

• Joel Lawrence Voss

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N27X34

Subject

• Neuroscience Institute Graduate Program

Keyword

• Neuroscience
• Biology

Date created

• 2007-05-11

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright