The problem of differing false-alarm rates for the process dissociation procedure: Comment on Verfaellie and Treadwell (1993).

Abstract

Results reported by M. Verfaellie and J. R. Treadwell (1993) contain an interesting paradox: Under standard study conditions in which subjects read words, amnesic patients and control subjects performed identically, both in terms of overall recognition hit rate and when the data were decomposed by L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure into consciously controlled and automatic components of performance. One reason for this curious outcome is that false-alarm rates differed considerably between amnesic patients and control subjects, which is not taken into account in Verfaellie and Treadwell's application of the process dissociation procedure. Considered in this article are three possible reactions to the problem of false-alarm rates differing between subject groups (or between experimental conditions) for the process dissociation procedure. A correction can be applied either (a) before the process dissociation procedure is used or (b) after the consciously controlled component has been estimated from the procedure. Alternatively, (c) data with this problem may simply be uninterpretab le through analysis with the process dissociation procedure. Verfaellie and Treadwell (1993) reported an interesting study in which Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure was applied to recognition memory performance of both amnesic and control subjects following manipulation of an independent variable. The process dissociation procedure was originally developed for separating responding on a consciously controlled basis (remembering) from that driven by automatic factors (presumably based on perceptual fluency [Jacoby, 1983] or intra-item integration [Mandler, 1989]). We do not describe the full logic of the procedure here, but accounts are provided in Verfaellie and Treadwell's (1993) article and in Jacoby's (1991) original article (see too Jacoby, Toth, & Yonelinas, 1993). During the first phase of Verfaellie and Treadwell's (1993) experiment, subjects read words and generated words from anagrams. During a second phase, subjects heard words. During a third phase, the recognition test, a series of words was presented visually, and subjects were asked to decide, for each word, whether it was old or new. The recognition test was conducted under one of two instructional sets, referred to as inclusion and exclusion conditions. In the inclusion condition, subjects were told to call an item old if they had read the word, solved it as an anagram, or heard the word during the first two phases of