Recollective experience in word and nonword recognition

The functional relationship between memory and consciousness was investigated in two experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing an item whether they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence in the study list or recognized it on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection. Low-frequency words, relative to high-frequency words, enhanced recognition accompanied by conscious recollection but did not influence recognition in the absence of conscious recollection. By contrast, nonwords compared with words enhanced recognition in the absence of conscious recollection and reduced recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. A third experiment showed that confidence judgments in recognizing nonword targets corresponded with recognition performance, not with recollective experience. These measures of conscious awareness therefore tap qualitatively different components of memory, not some unitary dimension such as "trace strength." The findings are interpreted as providing further support for the distinction between episodic memory and other memory systems, and also as providing more qualified support for theories that assume that recognition memory entails two components, one of which may also give rise to priming effects in implicit memory.     

Recollective experience in the revelation effect: Separating the contributions of recollection and familiarity

The revelation effect is a phenomenon of recognition memory in which words presented for a recognition decision are more likely to be identified as previously studied if they are initially disguised and are then somehow revealed to the subject. The goal of the present experiments was to determine whether the revelation effect has similar or different influences on the conscious recollection of a previous encounter with a test item and on the feeling of familiarity evoked by a test item. The process-dissociation procedure (Experiment 1) and the remember/know procedure (Experiment 2) were used to achieve this goal. The main findings of these experiments were that revealing an item at test (1) increased the feeling of familiarity associated with that item, especially if it was not previously studied, and (2) decreased conscious recollection of previously studied items. These data narrow the range of potential explanations of the revelation effect.     

Recollection and familiarity in recognition memory: adult age differences and neuropsychological test correlates

Dual process theories account for age-related changes in memory by proposing that old age is associated with deficits in recollection together with invariance in familiarity. The authors evaluated this proposal in recognition by examining recollection and familiarity estimates in young and older adults across 3 process estimation methods: inclusion/exclusion, remember/know, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC). Consistent with a previous literature review (Light, Prull, LaVoie, & Healy, 2000), the authors found age invariance in familiarity when process estimates were derived from the inclusion/exclusion method, but the authors found age differences favoring the young when familiarity estimates were derived from the remember/know and ROC methods. Recollection estimates were lower for older adults in all 3 methods. Recollection and familiarity had variable relationships with frontal- and temporal-lobe measures of neuropsychological functioning in older adults, depending on which method was used to generate process estimates. These data suggest that although recollection deficits appear to be the rule in aging, not all estimates of familiarity show age invariance.     

Melody recognition at fast and slow tempos: effects of age, experience, and familiarity

Eighty-one listeners defined by three age ranges (18-30, 31-59, and over 60 years) and three levels of musical experience performed an immediate recognition task requiring the detection of alterations in melodies. On each trial, a brief melody was presented, followed 5 sec later by a test stimulus that either was identical to the target or had two pitches changed, for a same-different judgment. Each melody pair was presented at 0.6 note/sec, 3.0 notes/sec, or 6.0 notes/sec. Performance was better with familiar melodies than with unfamiliar melodies. Overall performance declined slightly with age and improved substantially with increasing experience, in agreement with earlier results in an identification task. Tempo affected performance on familiar tunes (moderate was best), but not on unfamiliar tunes. We discuss these results in terms of theories of dynamic attending, cognitive slowing, and working memory in aging.     

The role of familiarity in recognition

The role of familiarity in recognition was investigated by having subjects study a list of stimuli, some of which had been presented earlier in the experiment. The number of positive responses, both to targets and distractors, increased as a result of this familiarization process. This familiarization process had a greater effect on false alarms than on hits, so that recognition accuracy was lower for familiar stimuli than for relatively novel stimuli. This pattern of results differs from that found in most experiments studying the effects of linguistic word frequency on recognition.     

Recollective experience, normal aging, and frontal dysfunction.

This study examined the nature of verbal recognition memory in young and old subjects. Following presentation of a word list, subjects undertook a yes-no recognition test and indicated whether their decision was based on explicit recollection or assessment of familiarity. Explicit recollection declined with age, and familiarity-based recognition increased. Furthermore, the extent to which older subjects relied on familiarity-based recognition correlated with neuropsychological indices of frontal lobe dysfunction. A further experiment indicated that the change from explicit recollection to familiarity-based responding was unrelated to changes in older subjects' confidence about their memory. The data indicate the central role of frontal dysfunction in understanding age-related memory loss.     

Environmental context and recognition: the role of recollection and familiarity

Evidence for effects of changed environmental context on recognition has been equivocal. Using 3 experiments, the author investigated the role of environmental context from a dual-processing approach. Experiment 1 showed that testing word recognition in a novel context led to a reliable decrement but only for recognition accompanied by conscious recollection, with familiarity-based recognition judgments being unaffected. This was replicated in Experiment 2 using stimuli that were novel to the participants (nonwords). Experiment 3 showed that the decrement in recollection also occurred when the changed-context condition involved presenting items in a different but familiar context. The results suggest that effects of environmental context will only be found when recognition is accompanied by conscious recollection and that this effect is due to a specific item-context association.     

Context effects in recognition memory: the role of familiarity and recollection

A variant of the process dissociation procedure was coupled with a manipulation of response signal lag to assess whether manipulations of context affect one or both of the familiarity and search processes described by the dual process model of recognition. Participants studied a list of word pairs (context+target) followed by a recognition test with target words presented in the same or different context, and in the same or different form as study (singular/plural). Participants were asked to recognize any target word regardless of changes to form (inclusion), or to only recognise words that were presented in the same form (exclusion). The standard context reinstatement effect was evident even at the short response lags. Analyses of the estimates of the contributions of familiarity and search processes suggest that the context effect demonstrated here can be attributed in part to the influence of familiarity on recognition, whereas the effect on recollection was less clear.     

Odor recognition: familiarity, identifiability, and encoding consistency

The investigation examined the association between the perceived identity of odorous stimuli and the ability to recognize the previous occurrence of them. The stimuli comprised 20 relatively familiar odorous objects such as chocolate, leather, popcorn, and soy sauce. Participants rated the familiarity of the odors and sought to identify them. At various intervals up to 7 days after initial inspection, the participants sought to recognize the odors among sets of distractor odors that included such items as soap, cloves, pipe tobacco, and so on. The recognition response entailed a confidence rating as to whether or not an item had appeared in the original set. At the time of testing, the participants also sought to identify the stimuli again. The results upheld previous findings of excellent initial recognition memory for environmentally relevant odors and slow forgetting. The results also uncovered, for the first time, a strong association between recognition memory and identifiability, rated familiarity, and the ability to use an odor label consistently at inspection and subsequent testing. Encodability seems to enhance rather than to permit recognizability. Even items identified incorrectly or inconsistently were recognized at levels above chance.     

The role of stimulus familiarity in context-dependent recognition

Memory & Cognition - Investigations of context-dependent recognition, a phenomenon in which recognition is better for items studied and tested with the same rather than different context, have...     

Novelty effects on recollection and familiarity in recognition memory

Recognition memory is better for novel or distinctive items than for non-novel items. However, it is not known whether these effects reflect changes in recollection or in familiarity-based recognition judgments. Some previous results have indicated that recollection should be more sensitive to novelty than to familiarity, whereas other results have suggested the opposite. We used avon Restorff paradigm in which a small proportion of studied items were made novel by presenting them in a color different from that of the majority of the study items. Memory was tested using a remember-know procedure. Across two experiments, stimulus novelty was found to benefit both recollection and familiarity. The effects on familiarity were observed under intentional and incidental encoding conditions, whereas the effects on recollection were significantly reduced, and no longer significant, under incidental as compared with intentional encoding conditions. Thus, both processes benefit from stimulus novelty, but the extent to which recollection benefits from novelty depends on the encoding condition.     

Exhaustive memory-scanning and familiarity discrimination: Separate mechanisms in recognition memory tasks

Experiment I was a yes-no recognition task with lists of one, two or four items to remember. Each item in the experiment appeared in only one list, and each list was presented only once. One group of subjects performed the task with complex pictures. Their results were incompatible with the hypothesis of exhaustive memory scanning, since the function relating “yes” response latency to list length was not parallel to but steeper than the function for “no” responses. Another group performed the task with words. Their results were consistent with exhaustive memory-scanning. Experiment II was a similar task in which the familiarity was varied of the test items to which the subjects had to respond “no”. That variation affected response latency with pictures but not with words. From these results and from a consideration of relevant neurological data, the hypothesis is advanced that familiarity discrimination and exhaustive memory-scanning are separate mechanisms.     

Influences of familiarity on the processing of faces

Three experiments are reported in which undergraduate subjects made simple perceptual judgements about the faces of familiar and unfamiliar academic staff. Any effects of familiarity in these tasks were assessed by comparison with performance on the two groups of faces when both sets were unfamiliar to student subjects at a different university. In experiment 1 there was no effect of familiarity of the faces on a task requiring judgements of expression, consistent with recent models of face processing in which expression analysis proceeds independently from the analysis of identity. In experiment 2 there was a significant effect of familiarity on a task in which the sex of the faces was judged. This appeared to be due to familiarity acting to facilitate only those faces whose sex was difficult to judge from the picture presented. In experiment 3, significant effects of familiarity were also observed when the task was to distinguish intact faces from jumbled faces. Although the effects of familiarity in experiments 2 and 3 were small and emerged in interactions between item sets and university, they suggest that a simple perceptual hierarchy of the kind proposed by Ellis requires some revision.     

Word-processing training and retraining: effects of adult age, experience, and interface

Novice (Experiment 1) and experienced (Experiment 2) young, middle-aged, and older adults learned a new word-processing application in keystrokes, menus, or menus-plus-icons interface conditions. Novices showed strong age differences in the time to complete the 3-day tutorial and in declarative and procedural tests of word-processing knowledge. Menus and menus-plus-icons were superior to keystrokes condition. though interface did not interact with age. Experienced users showed age-related slowing in learning rate but minimal age differences in test performance when retrained on a new word-processing program. Age and computer experience accounted for much of the variance in both learning time and word-processing performance; interface type, speed of processing, and spatial generation ability made additional contributions. Experience interacted with age to predict performance. Implications for training and retraining older workers are discussed.     

Effect of familiarity and viewpoint on face recognition in chimpanzees

Numerous studies have shown that familiarity strongly influences how well humans recognize faces. This is particularly true when faces are encountered across a change in viewpoint. In this situation, recognition may be accomplished by matching partial or incomplete information about a face to a stored representation of the known individual, whereas such representations are not available for unknown faces. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, share many of the same behavioral specializations for face processing as humans, but the influence of familiarity and viewpoint have never been compared in the same study. Here, we examined the ability of chimpanzees to match the faces of familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics in their frontal and 3/4 views using a computerized task. Results showed that, while chimpanzees were able to accurately match both familiar and unfamiliar faces in their frontal orientations, performance was significantly impaired only when unfamiliar faces were presented across a change in viewpoint. Therefore, like in humans, face processing in chimpanzees appears to be sensitive to individual familiarity. We propose that familiarization is a robust mechanism for strengthening the representation of faces and has been conserved in primates to achieve efficient individual recognition over a range of natural viewing conditions.     

Individual differences in forced-choice recognition memory: Partitioning contributions of recollection and familiarity

In forced-choice recognition memory, two different testing formats are possible under conditions of high target–foil similarity: Each target can be presented alongside foils similar to itself (forced-choice corresponding; FCC), or alongside foils similar to other targets (forced-choice noncorresponding; FCNC). Recent behavioural and neuropsychological studies suggest that FCC performance can be supported by familiarity whereas FCNC performance is supported primarily by recollection. In this paper, we corroborate this finding from an individual differences perspective. A group of older adults were given a test of FCC and FCNC recognition for object pictures, as well as standardized tests of recall, recognition, and IQ. Recall measures were found to predict FCNC, but not FCC performance, consistent with a critical role for recollection in FCNC only. After the common influence of recall was removed, standardized tests of recognition predicted FCC, but not FCNC performance. This is consistent with a contribution of only familiarity in FCC. Simulations show that a two-process model, where familiarity and recollection make separate contributions to recognition, is 10 times more likely to give these results than a single-process model. This evidence highlights the importance of recognition memory test design when examining the involvement of recollection and familiarity.     

Word familiarity and frequency in visual and auditory word recognition

Four experiments investigate printed word frequency and subjective rated familiarity. Words of varied printed frequency and subjective familiarity were presented. A reaction time advantage for high-familiarity and high-frequency words was found in visual (Experiment 1) and auditory (Experiment 2) lexical decision. In Experiments 3 and 4, a cued naming task elicited a naming response after a specified delay after presentation. In Experiment 3, naming of visual words showed a frequency effect with no naming delay. The frequency effect diminished at longer delay intervals. Naming times for auditorily presented words (Experiment 4) showed no frequency effect at any delay. Both naming experiments showed familiarity effects. The relevance of these results are discussed in terms of the role of printed frequency for theories of lexical access, task- and modality-specific effects, and the nature of subjective familiarity.