Remembering, Knowing and the Tulving-Wiseman Law

Abstract

The Tulving-Wiseman law is an empirical law that describes the relation between successive tests of recognition and recall of the same set of individual subject-items. It relates the probability of recognising the recallable items to the probability of recognising all the items, regardless of whether they are recalled. The relation represents a moderate degree of dependency between the tests. Two experiments are described in which subjects reported, in each of the two tests, whether they consciously remembered the item's occurrence in the study list, or they knew it occurred in the study list because it was familiar in the experimental context. Analyses of the relation between recognition and recall within each reported state of awareness revealed a much greater dependency for remember responses, and less dependency for know responses, than that predicted by the TulvingWiseman law. These findings are discussed in relation to memory systems theory and contextual accounts of recognition failure.