Rhythmic temporal structure at encoding enhances recognition memory

Presenting events in a rhythm has been shown to enhance perception and facilitate responses for stimuli that appear in synchrony with the rhythm, but little is known about how rhythm during encoding influences later recognition. In this study, participants were presented with images of everyday objects in an encoding phase prior to a recognition task in which they judged whether or not objects were previously presented. Blockwise, object presentation during encoding followed either a rhythmic (constant, predictable) or arrhythmic (random, unpredictable) temporal structure, of which participants were unaware. Recognition was greater for items presented in a rhythmic relative to an arrhythmic manner. During encoding, there was a Dm effect with larger positivity for rhythmic over arrhythmic stimuli. At recognition, memory specific ERP components were differentially affected by temporal structure: the FN400 old/new effect was unaffected by rhythmic structure, whilst the late positive component (LPC) old/new effect was observed only for rhythmically encoded items. Taken together, this study provides new evidence that memory specific processing at recognition is affected by temporal structure at encoding.

This is the author’s final accepted manuscript version of an article that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, published by MIT Press.