Spontaneous recognition: Underlying neural mechanisms and the role of confidence.

Intentional recognition judgements to a target stimulus can be biased by spontaneous, unintentional recognition of familiar but task-irrelevant distractors. We investigated the underlying neural processes of such biases using EEG, focusing on how behavioural and EEG markers of bias correlate with participants’ confidence in their recognition judgements. Preliminary results suggest that spontaneous recognition of distractors elicited an early frontal-central positivity that has been linked with a relatively automatic familiarity process, whilst intentional target recognition also produced a later left-parietal positivity that reflects recollection. This latter ERP effect was particularly modulated by recognition confidence. The findings suggest dissociable neurocognitive processes contribute to unintentional and intentional recognition.