Anterior prefrontal cortex and the recollection of contextual information
Section snippets
Participants
Sixteen right-handed native speakers of English (6 male, 10 female), with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, took part in the experiment. The volunteers (mean age = 22.8 years, range 19–28) were screened using a comprehensive medical questionnaire and informed consent was obtained in a manner approved by the Addenbrooke's NHS Trust Local Research Ethics Committee.
Design and materials
Participants were administered a study phase and a test phase. The study phase was undertaken prior to going into the MRI scanner,
Behavioural results
Recollection accuracy and reaction time data are displayed in Table 1. Importantly, given that the primary hypothesis in the present experiment concerns the contrast between task and position memory, there was no effect of the type of contextual detail on recollection accuracy, F(1, 15) = 0.03, n.s. There was a significant effect of stimulus type with context information related to faces recollected to a greater extent than that for words, F(1, 15) = 26.1, p < 0.001, and a significant interaction
Discussion
The principal finding of the present experiment is that the recollection of different kinds of contextual information is associated with differential recruitment of anterior PFC. This result provides empirical confirmation of a hypothesis that emerged qualitatively on the basis of discrepant results in a series of functional neuroimaging studies (Burgess et al., 2001, Cansino et al., 2002, Dobbins et al., 2002; Henson, Shallice, et al., 1999; Kahn et al., 2004, Nyberg et al., 1996, Ranganath et
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Kalina Christoff, Rik Henson, and Sam Gilbert for valuable comments and advice, and the staff of the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre. This work was supported by Wellcome Trust grant 061171.
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