Toward a complete decision model of item and source recognition

In a recognition memory test, subjects may be asked to decide whether a test item is old or new (item recognition) or to decide among alternative sources from which it might have been drawn for study (source recognition). Confidence-rating-based receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for these superficially similar tasks are quite different, leading to the inference of correspondingly different decision processes. A complete account of source and item recognition will require a single model that can be fit to the entire data set. We postulated a detection-theoretic decision space whose dimensions, in the style of Banks (2000), are item strength and the relative strengths of the two sources. A model that assumes decision boundaries of constant likelihood ratios, source guessing for unrecognized items, and nonoptimal allocation of attention can account for data from three canonical data sets without assuming any processes specifically devoted to recollection. Observed and predicted ROCs for one of these data sets are given in the article, and ROCs for the other two may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.