Recognition memory: Tulving's contributions and some new findings

Abstract

Endel Tulving has provided unparalleled contributions to the study of human memory. We consider here his contributions to the study of recognition memory and celebrate his first article on recognition, a nearly forgotten but (we argue) essential paper from 1968. We next consider his distinction between remembering and knowing, its relation to confidence, and the implications of high levels of false remembering in the DRM paradigm for using phenomenal experiences as measures of memory. We next pivot to newer work, the use of confidence accuracy characteristic plots in analyzing standard recognition memory experiments. We argue they are quite useful in such research, as they are in eyewitness research. For example, we report that even with hundreds of items, high confidence in a response indicates high accuracy, just as it does in one-item eyewitness research. Finally, we argue that amnesia (rapid forgetting) occurs in all people (not just amnesic patients) for some of their experiences. We provide evidence from three experiments revealing that subjects who fail to recognize recently studied items (miss responses) do so with high confidence 15–20% of the time. Such high confidence misses constitute our definition of everyday amnesia that can occur even in college student populations.