Twenty volunteers participated in Experiment

1, and 16 in Experiment 2. The data from four participants of Experiment 1 were removed; two due to lost data during recording, one due to excessive noise and artifacts in the EEG data, and one due to very low performance in the memory task (recall accuracy of 0%). The final group of 16 participants in Experiment 1 was composed of seven women and nine men, with ages ranging from 18 to 28 years (mean = 22 years; SD = 3.6 years). The 16 volunteers of Experiment 2 were 10 women and 6 men, with ages ranging from 20 to 31 years (mean: 26 years; SD: 3.6 years). Experiment 1: procedure and stimuli The experiment was subdivided into a study phase, a cued recall phase, and a recognition Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical phase. During Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the study phase, participants were presented with a list of 80 concrete nouns, with length varying between five and 10 characters, taken from the list by Van Overschelde and colleagues (2004) and complemented with

an English dictionary. All words were shown twice, in the same order, with a break after the first block. The motivation for presenting the words twice was twofold; first, it Protein Tyrosine Kinase inhibitor elevated recall to a level that avoided floor effects, and second, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical it allowed us to have more trials per condition, which is vital for ERP analysis. Each trial started with the presentation of a fixation cross for 500 msec. Then a word was presented in the middle of a gray screen (size 21′), which remained visible for 3500 msec. Words were presented either in standard font or in novel font. Standard-font words had a font Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical size of 17 dots, with black color and courier new as font type. Novel-font words had font size of 30 dots, a variable color (one of 10 possible colors, with each color repeated twice within the list) and variable

font type (unique for each novel word within a list). Participants were seated 80 cm away from the screen, leading to the following visual angles: Standard words, 2.5–5 degrees (depending on the length of the words), for novel words, 5.7–9.6 degrees. Novel-font words were presented in the same font and color on their two presentations. The first 10 words were always Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical presented in standard font. Of the remaining 70, a random 20 were presented in novel fonts and the remaining 50 in standard font. Word order, and assignment to condition, were randomized anew for each participant (two novel-font words could thus follow one another, although with low likelihood). During the presentation of the found word, after a variable delay (from 817 to 1797 msec, mean 1344 msec, to ensure an accurate baseline for the ERP data), a sound was presented. Sounds were of two types; either a standard “beep” tone (2.2 kHz, 300 msec) presented in 58 of 80 trials, or a novel, nonfamiliar sound clip belonging to one of three different categories, namely animal, human, and mechanical sounds (previously used in Sambeth et al. 2006). The latter were presented in 22 of 80 trials.