Two event-related potential experiments were conducted to investigate the temporal and the spatial distributions of the old/new effects for the item recognition task and the auditory source retrieval task using picture and Chinese character as stimuli respectively. Stimuli were presented on the center of the screen with their names read out either by female or by male voice simultaneously during the study phase and then two tests were performed separately. One test task was to differentiate the old items from the new ones, and the other task was to judge the items read out by a certain voice during the study phase as targets and other ones as non-targets. The results showed that the old/new effect of the auditory source retrieval task was more sustained over time than that of the item recognition task in both experiments, and the spatial distribution of the former effect was wider than that of the latter one. Both experiments recorded reliable old/new effect over the prefrontal cortex during the source retrieval task. However, there existed some differences of the old/new effect for the auditory source retrieval task between picture and Chinese character, and LORETA source analysis indicated that the differ- ences might be rooted in the temporal lobe. These findings demonstrate that the relevancy of the old/new effects between the item recognition task and the auditory source retrieval task supports the dual-process model; the spatial and the temporal distributions of the old/new effect elicited by the auditory source retrieval task are regulated by both the feature of the experimental material and the perceptual attribute of the voice.
