Strength-based mirror effects in item and associative recognition: Evidence for within-list criterion changes

Strength-based mirror effects occur when the hit rate is higher and the false alarm rate is lower following strongly encoded study lists than when following more weakly encoded study lists. In Experiments 1A and 1B, strength-based mirror effects were observed in separate tests of single item and associative recognition for random word pairs. In Experiment 2, strength-based mirror effects were again seen when item and associative recognition were tested together. Finally, in Experiments 3 and 4, opposing strength-based mirror effects were observed for item and associative recognition when individual words and word pairs were presented at different rates in the same study lists. Strength-based mirror effects could result from participants' adopting a more conservative decision criterion following strong lists than following weak ones. If this is the case for both item and associative recognition, the present results demonstrate that subjects can adopt different response criteria for different recognition tasks and can alternate between them on a trial-by-trial basis.