Neural correlates of the episodic encoding of pictures and words

Abstract

The effects of levels of processing (LoP) on memory performance are extensively studied in psychology for about half a century. The initial observation of superior memory for words studied under a semantic orienting task instead of a perceptual orienting task elicited a theoretical debate about the underlying mechanisms of this effect. The main aim of this study was to explore the results of LoP on two distinct components of recollection memory: context recollection, and target recollection—processes recently differentiated in dual-recollection theory. The considerable research has been dedicated to understanding the mechanisms underlying two highly consistent empirical findings: the quantity of processing (LoP) effect, and thus the image superiority effect. The former is an observation that semantically encoded items are better remembered than perceptually encoded items, whereas the latter shows those pictures are generally easier to recollect than words. The aim of this paper is to analyse the LoP effect for words and pictures from a comparatively new theoretical perspective of the dualrecollection theory