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The P600 during sentence reading predicts behavioral and neural markers of recognition memory
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Poster D97 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Friederike Contier1, Milena Rabovsky1; 1University of Potsdam, Germany
The P600 event-related potential component is elicited by a wide range of anomalies and ambiguities during sentence comprehension and remains important for neurocognitive models of language comprehension (e.g., Li & Ettinger, 2023, Cogn.). On the neurobiological level, it has recently been proposed that the P600, similar to the earlier domain-general P3, signals phasic norepinephrine release from the locus coeruleus to salient stimuli that need selective attention and behavioral adaptation (e.g., Sassenhagen & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2015, Cortex). Transient norepinephrine activity has also been linked to explicit memory formation, since it concurrently innervates limbic structures that are crucial for long-term learning (Sara, 2009, Nat. Rev. Neurosci.). Thus, if the P600 during sentence comprehension indeed reflects phasic norepinephrine release from the locus coeruleus, its amplitude should be predictive of explicit memory formation. Here, we tested this prediction using a sentence reading and subsequent word recognition task. In the encoding phase, 36 participants read sentences word by word including a critical target noun that was either semantically deviant, morphosyntactically violated (incorrect article), or correct and semantically fitting. As expected, morphosyntactic violations elicited a large parietal P600, while the positivity on semantic deviants was additionally left-frontally distributed. In the subsequent word recognition task, participants judged whether a particular word (seen target vs new unseen word) appeared in a sentence during the encoding phase or not (Y/N). Behaviorally, seen targets that had appeared as a semantic violation during encoding were recognized better, but those that had appeared within morphosyntactic violations were recognized worse than correct control targets. In addition, correctly identified seen targets generally elicited a more pronounced old/new recollection ERP effect (positivity at 500-800 ms over frontal and left-parietal areas) than unseen words. Crucially, the P600 amplitude during encoding was related to these recognition effects in the subsequent memory task on a trial-by-trial basis: Recognition accuracy was better for violated words that had previously elicited a larger P600. However, this was only the case for semantically deviant words, but not morphosyntactic violations. Moreover, the amplitude of the old/new recollection ERP effect during recognition was positively related to the amplitude of the P600 during encoding. This relationship of ERPs between encoding and recognition was present for both semantic deviants and morphosyntactic violations. In sum, we find that the P600 predicts later recognition memory both on the behavioral and neural level. Such explicit memory effects further link the component to the LC/NE system, suggesting a more domain-general nature of the component. The link between the P600 and later recognition indicates that the neurocognitive processes that deal with salient and anomalous aspects in the linguistic input in the moment will also be involved in keeping this event available for later recognition. Lastly, the stronger behavioral memory effect for semantic deviants and the P600-memory effect elicited by them could be due to differences in the formed memory representation: Semantic mismatches might form a memory trace for the nouns themselves (which was tested in our recognition task) whereas morphosyntactic violations possibly elicit a memory trace specific to the article-noun mismatch instead.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Reading