| dc.description.abstract | The characteristics of specific (verbatim) and non-specific (gist) information are debated between the Source Monitoring Framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi and Lindsay, 1993) and the Fuzzy-trace theory (Reyna and Brainerd, 1995). The main purpose of the study is to test the representation of specific and non-specific information. Experiment 1 incorporated source memory test and Remember/Know procedure to address this issue. Subjects listened to words spoken by one male voice and one female voice at study, and made source judgments as well as Remember/Know judgments at test. We found that correct source judgments were primarily associated with Remember response. In experiment 2, we increased the variability of source attributes by presenting words spoken by either 4 speakers (2 males and 2 females) or by only 2 speakers (1 male and 1 female). At test, subjects made gender judgments followed by Remember/Know judgments. In accordance to the Fuzzy-trace theory, the gender recognition rate in the 4-voices condition was worse than the 2-voices condition. This result may due to the reliance on gist memory in the 4-voices condition hence decreasing the source accuracy. In experiment 3, we used ERPs under the similar procedure as in experiment 2 and found that the 2-voices condition elicited larger left parietal old/new effect, which is sensitive to the amount of information recollected. However, the Late Negativity effect, which reflects processes that form and retain integrated task-relevant information when needs continued evaluation (Johansson and Mecklinger, 2003) was larger in the 4-voices condition than in the 2-voices condition. Experiment 4 presented words spoken by 4 speakers (2 males and 2 females). At test, subjects made either gender or speaker judgments followed by Remember/Know judgments. The results showed that the retrieval of specific and non-specific information may not be independent. Consequently, the encoding of specific and non-specific information is more likely to accommodate by the Fuzzy-trace theory, but the retrieval of specific and non-specific information is not dissociated. | en_US |