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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on April 28, 2006

Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj054
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Article

Neural Processes Underlying Memory Attribution on a Reality-monitoring Task

Elizabeth A. Kensinger 1 * and Daniel L. Schacter 1

1 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 and the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Elizabeth A. Kensinger, E-mail: ekensing{at}wjh.harvard.edu


   Abstract

A relatively common form of memory distortion arises when individuals must discriminate items they have seen from those they have imagined (reality monitoring). The present fMRI investigation (at 1.5 T) focused on the processes that relate to memory assignment regardless of accuracy (e.g. that correspond with the belief that an item was presented as a picture, regardless of whether that belief is correct). Prior to the scan, participants (n = 16) viewed concrete nouns and formed mental images of the object named. Half of the names were followed by the object's photo. During the scan, participants saw the object names and indicated whether the corresponding photo had been studied. Activity in visual-processing regions (including the precuneus and fusiform gyrus) corresponded with the attribution of an item to a pictorial presentation. In contrast, activity in regions thought to be important for self-referential processing (including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate gyrus) was associated with attribution to a nonpresented source. These neural findings converge with behavioral evidence indicating that individuals use the amount of different types of information retrieved (e.g. perceptual detail, information about cognitive operations) to determine whether an item was imagined or perceived.

Keywords: fMRI; memory distortion; self-referential processing; visual processing.
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