Schedule of Events | Symposia

N400 amplitudes are sensitive to image memorability distinct from recognition performance

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Will Deng¹ (wuyizhe2@illinois.edu), Kara Federmeier¹; ¹University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Image memorability is an intrinsic property of an image that determines how likely it is to be remembered. Prior work with event-related potentials (ERPs) has shown memorability effects on perceptual and semantic processing: More memorable images evoke facilitated (less negative) responses for both the N300 and N400 components, associated with high-level visual processing and semantic memory access, respectively. However, it is unclear whether the ERP patterns are primarily reflecting differences in episodic encoding success, similar to the subsequent memory effect (SME), or unique properties of image processing separate from episodic encoding. To explore this question, we presented participants with images that varied across a wide range of memorability and recorded their ERPs time-locked to stimulus onset. After two days, participants returned to the lab for a yes/no recognition test that contained images from the previous session with fillers. We examined ERP responses at encoding as a function of both memorability and back-sorted recognition performance (hit or miss). A mixed-effect model revealed a main effect of memorability on N400 amplitudes, but, crucially, no significant main effect of recognition performance or interaction between the two. Our results suggest that N400 amplitudes are sensitive to item-level properties related to memorability but do not directly index episodic encoding effects when observed as part of SMEs. In particular, N400 amplitudes may reflect semantic processing fluency, which is important for memorability but imparts a relatively stochastic effect on subsequent memory rather than serving as a reliable predictor for episodic memory formation.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision