Abstract
Memory enhancement after repeated presentation of to-be-learned material is a wellknown phenomenon. It has been assumed that the repeated presentation of features common to a number of specific instances leads to decontextualized facts about the world, i.e., semantic knowledge. To investigate this issue, subjects studied celebrity faces along with faces of unknown individuals. Crucially, half of the unknown faces were repeated within the same study context (background and biographical information) while for the other half the contextual features changed across repetitions. Celebrity faces were chosen because they carry with them biographical information. The electrophysiological correlates of conceptual priming and explicit memory for these faces were examined. Explicit memory retrieval was associated with the early frontal old/new effect, the ERP correlate of familiarity, and the late parietal old/new effect, indexing recollection. Both ERP effects were elicited by celebrity faces and non-famous faces repeatedly studied in different contexts, whereas non-famous faces repeated in the same context elicited only the parietal old/new effect. Furthermore, conceptual priming was indexed by positive brain potentials over fronto-central regions, in addition to faster reaction times for previously presented faces. Again, a striking similarity between effects elicited by celebrity faces and non-famous faces repeated in varying contexts was observed. This indicates that repetition of features across different contexts bears some similarity to semantic knowledge.