Typography and color: Effects of salience and fluency on conscious recollective experience

Within one experiment the central assumptions of the distinctiveness/fluency account of recollective experience were tested and contrasted with predictions of processing theory. To manipulate perceptual salience, the typography of words was varied. Effects of conceptual salience were induced by a variation of word color. In the study phase participants generated different word or object images according to presented words. To manipulate perceptual and conceptual fluency one test group underwent a priming procedure in the test phase, consisting of a recognition test, whereby some primes were identical to the target words typographically or by color and others were not. Additionally, all participants were asked to make judgments of recollective experience (remember, know, guess) after the old/new decisions. The results of the data analyses confirm the distinctiveness/fluency account. Words written in an unusual typography or color were judged significantly more often as "remembered" than normal words. The priming procedure uncovered some effects of fluency on reaction times: old/new decisions took less time if prime and target words were perceptually or conceptually identical.     

Memory illusions: false recall and recognition in adults with Asperger's syndrome

As persons on the autistic spectrum are known not to use semantic features of word lists to aid recall, they might show diminished susceptibility to illusory memories that typically occur with lists of associated items. Alternatively, since such individuals also have poor source monitoring, they might show greater susceptibility. The authors found that adults with Asperger's syndrome (n = 10) recalled similar proportions of a nonpresented strong associate of the study list items, compared with controls (n = 15). In Experiment 2, rates of true and false recognition of study list associates did not differ significantly between Asperger (n = 10) and control (n = 10) participants. Moreover, the Asperger participants made fewer remember and more know judgments than controls for veridical but not for false recognitions. Thus, deficits found in some aspects of memory in people with Asperger's syndrome do not affect their susceptibility to memory illusions.     

Functional aspects of recollective experience

The functional relationship between recognition memory and conscious awareness was examined in two experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing a word whether or not they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence in the study list. Both levels of processing and generation effects were found to occur only for recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. Recognition in the absence of conscious recollection, although less likely, was generally reliable and uninfluenced by encoding conditions. These results are consistent with dual-process theories of recognition, which assume that recognition and priming in implicit memory have a common component. And they strengthen the case for making a functional distinction between episodic memory and other memory systems.     

The neurophysiological correlates of face processing in adults and children with Asperger's syndrome

Past research has found evidence for face and emotional expression processing differences between individuals with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and neurotypical (NT) controls at both the neurological and behavioural levels. The aim of the present study was to examine the neurophysiological basis of emotional expression processing in children and adults with AS relative to age- and gender-matched NT controls. High-density event-related potentials were recorded during explicit processing of happy, sad, angry, scared, and neutral faces. Adults with AS were found to exhibit delayed P1 and N170 latencies and smaller N170 amplitudes in comparison to control subjects for all expressions. This may reflect impaired holistic and configural processing of faces in AS adults. However, these differences were not observed between AS and control children. This may result from incomplete development of the neuronal generators of these ERP components and/or early intervention.     

Attention and recollective experience in recognition memory

The functional relation between recognition memory and conscious awareness was assessed in an experiment in which undivided attention at study was compared with two divided attention conditions, one more demanding than the other. When recognizing a word from the study list, subjects indicated whether they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence or recognized it on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection. Divided attention at study progressively impaired word recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. Recognition in the absence of conscious recollection was not affected by divided attention. These findings are interpreted as providing further support for the idea that recognition memory entails two distinct components, one based on associative and contextual information, the other based on a "traceless" awareness of familiarity.     

Forgetting in recognition memory with and without recollective experience

Retention interval was manipulated in two recognition-memory experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing a word whether its recognition was accompanied by some recollective experience ("remember") or whether it was recognized on the basis of familiarity without any recollective experience ("know"). Experiment 1 showed that between 10 min and 1 week, "remember" responses declined sharply from an initially higher level, whereas "know" responses remained relatively unchanged. Experiment 2 showed that between 1 week and 6 months, both kinds of responses declined at a similar, gradual rate and that despite quite low levels of performance after 6 months, both kinds of responses still gave rise to accurate discrimination between target words and lures. These findings are discussed in relationship to current ideas about multiple memory systems and processing accounts of explicit and implicit measures of retention.     

Components of recollective experience in cued recall

Components of recollective experience were examined in relation to cue effectiveness by presenting subjects with their own or someone else's associations as retrieval cues. When recalling an item, subjects indicated whether they consciously recollected its prior occurrence ("remembering") or recalled it on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection ("knowing"). The results showed that cue compatibility (self-generated vs. someone else's cues) and retention interval (immediate vs. delayed test) selectively impaired retention accompanied by recollective experience, as measured by remember responses, but had reduced effects in the absence of recollective experience, as measured by know responses. The results are discussed in terms of variables dissociating judgments of recollective experience.     

On the origin of functional differences in recollective experience

Abstract

Subjects studied target words that were repeated either immediately (lag0) or after six intervening items (lag6). At retention testing, subjects were required to discriminate targets from distractors and, contingent on a ‘yes' response, to classify each identified item as one that evoked either a ‘remember’ (R) response or a ‘know’ (K) response. An R response indicated recognition based on conscious recollection, and K, recognition without conscious recollection. R responses were significantly greater in lag6 than lag0 whereas the reverse was found for K responses. The data are interpreted as showing that R responses depend on the probability of a target stimulus engaging conscious effortful processing, whereas K responses are increased in the absence of conscious involvement at learning.     

The recollective experience of cross-modality confusion errors

There are at least two qualitatively different types of subjective experience that can accompany accurate recognition memory. Sometimes recognition is accompanied by conscious recollection of the learning episode (i.e., it isremembered), and in other cases it is not (i.e., it is simplyknown that the item is old). In the present study, we assessed the subjective experience that accompanies crossmodality confusion errors (misidentifying words as pictures) by measuring the extent to which subjects claimed toremember versusknow that the item was presented as a picture. The results of two experiments demonstrate that cross-modality confusion errors are often accompanied by conscious recollection, although not to the same extent as accurate memories. The findings also show that there is considerable overlap in the recollective experience that accompanies accurate and erroneous memories. Finally, the results support the contention that recollective experience cannot be directly inferred from test performance.     

Dissociative effects of alcohol on recollective experience

This article reports a study comparing the effects of a single dose of alcohol with a matched placebo drink on recognition memory with and without conscious recollection. A double-blind, cross-over design was used with healthy volunteers who were all social drinkers. Processing depth at study was manipulated using generate versus read instructions. Conscious recollection at test was assessed using the remember-know-guess paradigm (Gardiner, 1988; Tulving, 1985). Alcohol significantly reduced conscious recollection (remember responses) but had no effect on recognition in the absence of conscious recollection (know responses). False alarms rates were low and unaffected by alcohol. Previous findings that generation effects are found only for remember responses were closely replicated. A further dissociation of the generation effect occurred between treatments in that deeper processing at study facilitated recognition on placebo but not on alcohol. That both alcohol and depth of processing produce dissociative effects on recollective experience provides further evidence that remembering and knowing reflect distinct memory systems.     

Perceptual effects and recollective experience in face recognition

Four experiments were conducted investigating the effect of size congruency on facial recognition memory, measured by remember, know and guess responses. Different study times were employed, that is extremely short (300 and 700 ms), short (1,000 ms), and long times (5,000 ms). With the short study time (1,000 ms) size congruency occurred in knowing. With the long study time the effect of size congruency occurred in remembering. These results support the distinctiveness/ fluency account of remembering and knowing as well as the memory systems account, since the size congruency effect that occurred in knowing under conditions that facilitated perceptual fluency also occurred independently in remembering under conditions that facilitated elaborative encoding. They do not support the idea that remember and know responses reflect differences in trace strength.     

Cognitive effort and recollective experience in recognition memory

The difficulty of the cognitive operations required to process study items was manipulated in two experiments investigating recollective experience. In subsequent recognition tests, subjects indicated whether their recognition judgements for items processed in these tasks were based on recollection ("remember" responses) or on familiarity ("know" responses). In Experiment 1 target items were presented in the context of a category decision task. It was found that remember responses increased with the difficulty of the category decision. For positive instances, remember responses were greater for items of low instance frequency than for items of high instance frequency, while for negative instances remember responses were greater for items from similar categories than for items from dissimilar categories. These effects were not present in know responses. In Experiment 2, remember responses were more frequent when study items had been presented in the form of anagrams to be solved than when they had been presented in the form of words to be read aloud. The incidence of know responses was not affected by the format in which study items were presented. Source judgements were also more accurate when recognition was based on recollection. It is argued that the type of conscious awareness experienced during recognition is determined by the knowledge activated by items presented in the recognition test, which in turn is determined by the nature of the operations engaged at encoding.     

Gaze control and recollective experience in face recognition

In two experiments, we examined the relation between gaze control and recollective experience in the context of face recognition. In Experiment 1, participants studied a series of faces, while their eye movements were eliminated either during study or test, or both. Subsequently, they made remember/know judgements for each recognized test face. The preclusion of eye movements impaired explicit recollection without affecting familiarity-based recognition. In Experiment 2, participants examined unfamiliar faces under two study conditions (similarity vs. difference judgements), while their eye movements were registered. Similarity vs. difference judgements produced the opposite effects on remember/know responses, with no systematic effects on eye movements. However, face recollection was related to eye movements, so that remember responses were associated with more frequent refixations than know responses. These findings suggest that saccadic eye movements mediate the nature of recollective experience, and that explicit recollection reflects a greater consistency between study and test fixations than familiarity-based face recognition.     

Judgment of blame in teenagers with Asperger's syndrome

The judgment of blame was studied in a group of 28 teenagers, 14 with Asperger syndrome (AS) and 14 typically developed. Teenagers in each group were matched by age, cognitive development and academic level. They were presented with 12 short vignettes in which they had to judge an action according to the intent of the actor (deliberate and accidental), the consequences of the action (presence and absence) and the seriousness of the situation (low, medium and high). Results showed a significant difference in the patterns of judgment of both groups. The AS group judged the action according to the physical consequence of the action more than the intent of the actor; the opposite was observed with the control group. In addition, the AS teenagers were less capable than the control group of grading injury to a person when apportioning blame especially when they were not familiar with the social situations. This result suggests that the judgement of the seriousness of the outcome of the social interaction is linked with its level of familiarity. Furthermore, result are congruent with the assumption that two different cognitive structures, deontic reasoning and perspective taking, are involved in the judgment of blame.     

Mediators of age-related differences in recollective experience in recognition memory

This study examined states of awareness with the Remember/Know paradigm during verbal recognition memory in young and old adults. Following the presentation of a word list, subjects undertook a recognition test and indicated whether they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence (R) or recognize it on some other basis, without conscious recollection (K). In this individual-difference approach we also incorporated various processing-speed and working-memory measures to study the link between aging, states of awareness and processing resources. The results revealed that, compared to younger adults, older adults exhibited a decline in the amount of R responses during the recognition test whereas the amount of K responses did not change. Structural equation modeling indicated that a slower processing speed associated with a limited working-memory capacity is a key to explaining age-related variance in conscious recollection. The findings offer further support for the distinction between remembering and knowing and for the processing-resources hypothesis of aging.     

Comparing recollective experience in true and false autobiographical memories

This study investigated whether true autobiographical memories are qualitatively distinct from false autobiographical memories using a variation of the interview method originally reported by E. F. Loftus and J. Pickrell (1995). Participants recalled events provided by parents on 3 separate occasions and were asked to imagine true and false unremembered events. True memories were rated by both participants and observers as more rich in recollective experience and were rated by participants as more important, more emotionally intense, as having clearer imagery, and as less typical than false memories. Rehearsal frequency was used as a covariate, eliminating these effects. Imagery in true memories was most often viewed from the field perspective, whereas imagery in false memories was most often viewed from the observer perspective. More information was communicated in true memories, and true memories contained more information concerning the consequences of described events. Results suggest repeated remembering can make false memories more rich in recollective experience and more like true memories. Differences between true and false memories suggest some potentially distinct characteristics of false memories and provide insight into the process of false memory creation.     

The role of source memory in older adults' recollective experience

Younger adults' "remember" judgments are accompanied by better memory for the source of an item than "know" judgments. Furthermore, remember judgments are not merely associated with better memory for individual source features but also with bound memory for multiple source features. However, older adults, independent of their subjective memory experience, are generally less likely to "bind" source features to an item and to each other in memory (i.e., the associative deficit). In two experiments, we tested whether memory for perceptual source features, independently or bound, is also the basis for older adults' remember responses or if their associative deficit leads them to base their responses on other types of information. The results suggest that retrieval of perceptual source features, individually or bound, forms the basis for younger but not for older adults' remember judgments even when the overall level of memory for perceptual sources is closely equated (Experiment 1) and when attention is explicitly directed to the source information at encoding (Experiment 2).     

Sex differences in recollective experience for olfactory and verbal information

We examined recollective experience as a function of sex for olfactory and verbal information. In the first study, men and women studied a set of highly familiar odors with incidental or intentional encoding instructions. In the second study, participants were presented with a number of sentences. At recognition, participants indicated whether their positive response was based on conscious recollection (remembering), a feeling of familiarity (knowing), or guessing. The results indicated that recollection was higher among women than men, and that familiarity-based recognition was equally large across sex for both types of information.The finding that the sex-related experiential difference disappeared when controlling for verbal proficiency suggests that sex-related differences in activating verbal information play an important role for sex differences in recollective experience.     

Effects of self-referencing on feeling-of-knowing accuracy and recollective experience

The current research investigated the impact of self-referencing (SR) on feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgements to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these metamemory judgements and specifically test the relationship between recollective experiences and FOK accuracy within the accessibility framework FOK judgements are thought to be by-products of the retrieval process and are therefore closely related to memory performance. Because relating information to one's self is one of the factors enhancing memory performance, we investigated the effect of self-related encoding on FOK accuracy and recollective experience. We compared performance on this condition to a separate deep processing condition in which participants reported the frequency of occurrence of pairs of words. Participants encoded pairs of words incidentally, and following a delay interval, they attempted at retrieving each target prompted by its cue. Then, they were re-presented with all cues and asked to provide FOK ratings regarding their likelihood of recognising the targets amongst distractors. Finally, they were given a surprise recognition task in which following each response they identified whether the response was remembered, known or just guessed. Our results showed that only SR at encoding resulted in better memory, higher FOK accuracy and increased recollective experience.