Unitization improves item recognition through less overall neural processing

It is widely accepted that unitization can promote familiarity-based associative recognition, but the role of unitization in recognition of individual component elements remains unclear. Our goals of this study were to elaborate how unitization influenced item recognition and to further examine the effect of unitization on the extent to which familiarity and recollection contributed to item recognition. The results showed that unitization could facilitate item recognition through reducing the contribution of recollection. Together with previous findings that unitization could facilitate associative recognition, we believed unitization was an effective encoding strategy to improve memory performance.