Exploring the mental representation underlying familiarity assessment.

Abstract

A new method was used to explore the role of perceptual information in familiarity-based recognition. The method uses a pairwise recognition task to compare recognition judgments to a test word when that word is related and unrelated to an immediately preceding word. If the false-alarm rate to the test word is greater when the two words are related, this is interpreted as reflecting an increase in the likelihood of positive familiarity assessment to the test word (Ngo, C. T., Sargent, J., & Dopkins, S. [2007]. Level of discrimination for recognition judgments reduced following the recognition of semantically related words. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 415-436. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.05.007). The occurrence of such an increase for a given sort of preceding word-test word relatedness is taken as indicating that information of the sort in question is involved in familiarity-based recognition. Whereas previous work with this method has failed to find evidence that perceptual information is involved in familiarity-based recognition, the present study observed such evidence, under conditions in which previous work with other methods suggested that perceptual information would be likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition. Thus, the study helped to validate the method and produced converging evidence that perceptual information is sometimes involved in familiarity-based recognition. The results of the study suggest that perceptual information is more likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition when the lists for the recognition task are short.