The late posterior negativity in ERP studies of episodic memory: action monitoring and retrieval of attribute conjunctions

Abstract

The focus of the present paper is a late posterior negative slow wave (LPN) that has frequently been reported in event-related potential (ERP) studies of memory. An overview of these studies suggests that two broad classes of experimental conditions tend to elicit this component: (a) item recognition tasks associated with enhanced action monitoring demands arising from response conflict and (b) memory tasks that require the binding of items with contextual information specifying the study episode. A combined stimulus- and response-locked analysis of data from two studies mapping onto these classes allowed a temporal and functional decomposition of the LPN. While only the LPN observed in the item recognition task could be attributed to the involvement of a posteriorly distributed response-locked error-related negativity (or error negativity; ERN/Ne) occurring immediately after the response, the source-memory task was associated with a stimulus-locked negative slow wave occurring prior and during response execution that was evident when data were matched for response latencies. We argue that the presence of the former reflects action monitoring due to high levels of response conflict, whereas the latter reflects retrieval processes that may act to reconstruct the prior study episode when task-relevant attribute conjunctions are not readily recovered or need continued evaluation.