Abstract
Familiarity and recollection are believed to be two distinct processes of recognition memory in humans. Subjectively, familiarity provides a sense of 'oldness' to perceiving a previously encountered stimulus, whereas recollection recovers events and their contextual details. Despite many investigations involving ERP, fMRI, and behavioural measures, an EEG approach is lacking. With a 2-alternative forced-choice recognition memory task, using abstract visual stimuli, we set out to investigate the role of neural synchrony as measured by human scalp EEG during both encoding and retrieval of recognition memory. In particular, we show that the prestimulus period theta and beta band power may support encoding of stimuli that are subsequently recollected, compared to being familiar. These findings are suggestive of a favourable brain state for a particular type of memory processing.
