Theories Of Recognition Memory Research Articles

Two dichotomies of recognition memory.

Murdock (1974, Human Memory: Theory and Data, Lawrence Erlbaum) distinguished between the encoding and retrieval of item information (the representation of individual events) and associative information (the representation of relations between separate events). Mandler (1980, Psychological Review, 87, 252-271) proposed that recognition decisions could be based on the sense of familiarity engendered by the stimulus or on the retrieval of conceptual, semantic, and contextual information about the target. These two distinctions have motivated a considerable amount of research over the past 40 years and have provided much of the bases for our current understanding of recognition memory. Selective aspects of this research are reviewed to show how theories of recognition memory have developed to embody these two dichotomies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Stimulus effects and the mediation of recognition memory.

Two broad approaches characterize the type of evidence that mediates recognition memory: discrete state and continuous. Discrete-state models posit a thresholded memory process that provides accurate information about an item (it is detected) or, failing that, no mnemonic information about the item. Continuous models, in contrast, posit the existence of graded mnemonic information about an item. Evidence favoring 1 approach over the other has been mixed, suggesting the possibility that the mediation of recognition memory may be adaptable and influenced by other factors. We tested this possibility with 2 experiments that varied the semantic similarity of word targets and fillers. Experiment 1, which used semantically similar fillers, displayed evidence of continuous mediation (contrary to Kellen & Klauer, 2015), whereas Experiment 2, which used semantically dissimilar fillers, displayed evidence of discrete mediation. The results have implications for basic theories of recognition memory, as well as for theories of applied domains like eyewitness identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

George Mandler (1924-2016).

Presents an obituary for George Mandler, who died in London on May 6, 2016 at the age of 91. Mandler was one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution in psychology. He was instrumental in moving the study of human learning from notions based largely on associations to a view of memory as an organized, nested hierarchical structure. Mandler was also a major proponent of the dual-process theory of recognition memory, in which general feelings of familiarity are distinguished from the context-rich experience of recollection. He brought the study of emotion into prominence, suggesting how emotion and cognition are related. Finally, he repatriated the concept of consciousness from its intellectual exile under behaviorism, stating boldly in 1975 that the construct was respectable, useful, and probably necessary. Mandler edited the Psychological Review from 1970 to 1976, chaired the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, and was president of APA Divisions 1 (General Psychology) and 3 (Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science). (PsycINFO Database Record

Commentary on: Recollection reduces unitised familiarity effect.

Commentary on: Recollection reduces unitised familiarity effect.

Manipulating letter fluency for words alters electrophysiological correlates of recognition memory

The mechanisms that give rise to familiarity memory have received intense research interest. One current topic of debate concerns the extent to which familiarity is driven by the same fluency sources that give rise to certain implicit memory phenomena. Familiarity may be tied to conceptual fluency, given that familiarity and conceptual implicit memory can exhibit similar neurocognitive properties. However, familiarity can also be driven by perceptual factors, and its neural basis under these circumstances has received less attention. Here we recorded brain potentials during recognition testing using a procedure that has previously been shown to encourage a reliance on letter information when assessing familiarity for words. Studied and unstudied words were derived either from two separate letter pools or a single letter pool (“letter-segregated” and “normal” conditions, respectively) in a within-subjects contrast. As predicted, recognition accuracy was higher in the letter-segregated relative to the normal condition. Electrophysiological analyses revealed parietal old–new effects from 500–700ms in both conditions. In addition, a topographically dissociable occipital old–new effect from 300–700ms was present in the letter-segregated condition only. In a second experiment, we found that similar occipital brain potentials were associated with confident false recognition of words that shared letters with studied words but were not themselves studied. These findings indicate that familiarity is a multiply determined phenomenon, and that the stimulus dimensions on which familiarity is based can moderate its neural correlates. Conceptual and perceptual contributions to familiarity vary across testing circumstances, and both must be accounted for in theories of recognition memory and its neural basis.

What could cognitive neuroscience tell us about recognition memory?

This paper is concerned with how the debate between single‐ and dual‐process theories of recognition memory might be resolved. We argue that this is only possible if the theories concerned are competing to offer an explanation for the same phenomenon. We distinguish two kinds of explanations of recognition memory—roughly, one that explains what a person does to recognise an item, and another that explains what the brain does in order to enable a person to recognise an item. Our first point is that single‐ and dual‐process theories typically, and perhaps counter‐intuitively, do not offer competing explanations. Our second point is that this suggests two clear roles for neuroscience to play in the debate. Adjudicating between constitutive explanations would, we argue, require new experimental designs. Adjudicating between causal explanations requires prior determination of what function the brain is performing (an agreed psychological theory) before neuroscience could tell us how the brain is producing that performance.

Threshold models of recognition and the recognition heuristic

AbstractAccording to the recognition heuristic (RH) theory, decisions follow the recognition principle: Given a high validity of the recognition cue, people should prefer recognized choice options compared to unrecognized ones. Assuming that the memory strength of choice options is strongly correlated with both the choice criterion and recognition judgments, the RH is a reasonable strategy that approximates optimal decisions with a minimum of cognitive effort (Davis-Stober, Dana, & Budescu, 2010). However, theories of recognition memory are not generally compatible with this assumption. For example, some threshold models of recognition presume that recognition judgments can arise from two types of cognitive states: (1) certainty states in which judgments are almost perfectly correlated with memory strength and (2) uncertainty states in which recognition judgments reflect guessing rather than differences in memory strength. We report an experiment designed to test the prediction that the RH applies to certainty states only. Our results show that memory states rather than recognition judgments affect use of recognition information in binary decisions.

Memory conjunction errors: The effects of presentation duration and study repetition

The memory-strengthening manipulations of increased presentation duration and increased number of times items were presented were manipulated in the memory conjunction paradigm. Participants viewed parent words once or three times during the study portion of the experiment for 250 ms, 1000 ms, or 3000 ms. After an old/new recognition test participants were asked to give explanations for their answers from the recognition test. The results of true and false recognition as well as recall-to-reject responses (e.g., I know I did not see blackbird since I saw blackmail) indicated that both familiarity and recollection were influenced by the memory-strengthening manipulations. The results provide evidence for dual-process theories of recognition memory and the opposing processes of familiarity and recollection.

Study repetition and the rejection of conjunction lures

Four experiments were conducted to provide further support for a dual-process approach to conjunction errors in recognition memory over a single-process approach. In Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b study words were repeated once (2 presentations) or several times (8 or 16 presentations), and a response signal delay (RSD) was manipulated (short vs long). Short RSD groups produced lower hit rates but higher conjunction error rates compared to long RSD groups. Repetition effects on conjunction errors occurred for short RSD but not long RSD groups. In Experiment 3, additional judgements on new items were solicited to show that the “null” effects for long RSD groups in the earlier experiments were, in fact, illusory. Together, the experiments provide evidence for recollection-based rejections of conjunction lures and support a dual-process theory of recognition memory over a single-process model.

Similarity, global matching, and judgments of frequency.

In the test-pair similarity effect, forced-choice recognition is more accurate for similar test pairs, such as leopard-cheetah, than it is for unrelated test pairs, such as leopard-turnip. According to global matching models, this occurs because the retrieved familiarities of similar items are correlated. In the Minerva 2 model, global matching underlies frequency judgments as well as recognition memory. One implication of this model is that judged frequencies of similar items should be correlated. Another implication is that judgments of summed frequency for pairs of words (how many presentations were there of word1 and word2 combined?) should have higher variance when word1 and word2 are similar than when they are unrelated. These predictions were tested and confirmed in two experiments. A review of these and other results suggests that theories of recognition memory should also be applicable to frequency-judgment tasks.

Using ROC curves to test models of recognition memory: the relationship between presentation duration and slope.

Many theories of memory predict that the slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve should decrease with increases in the memory strength of old items. While several prior studies have failed to demonstrate this effect, the results of two experiments demonstrate that increasing presentation duration can reduce the slope of the z-transformed ROC curve. These results raise questions about the generality of prior results and of dual-process theories designed to accommodate those results. We close by emphasizing that determining the experimental circumstances that affect whether or not the slope of the z-transformed ROC curve decreases will provide important constraints on theories of recognition memory.

Semantic contexts and face recognition

The present study investigated the effects of the new context reinstatement procedure on recognition memory for faces. All faces were portrayed in distinctive background contexts which were pretested to induce a negative emotion, a positive emotion or no emotion at all. These contexts were, at test, either the same (e.g. the same concentration camp), changed (e.g. concentration camp→road accident) or changed but of the same type (e.g. 'semantic context': two different concentration camps). Results provided evidence of considerable improvement of recognition performance with semantic context. Moreover, a context inducing a negative emotion was shown to impair face recognition, but semantic context was found to counteract such an impairment. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for theories of recognition memory and practical contributions to eyewitness identification. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Language: en

Identifying the Basis for the Word Frequency Effect in Recognition Memory

Recent theories of recognition memory have identified two bases on which recognition-memory judgments may be made: recollection, which involves retrieval of contextual information from an earlier episode of stimulus presentation; and familiarity, which is distinguished by a general sense of familiarity in the absence of recollection. Four experiments were conducted to test whether the word frequency effect (WFE) in recognition memory (superior performance with low- in comparison with high-frequency targets) results from recollection-based processes, familiarity-based processes, or both. In two of the experiments, superior memory for aspects of the study context was found for low-frequency in comparison with high-frequency words, suggesting frequency-related differences in recollection. The other two experiments used Jacoby's (1991) inclusion/exclusion paradigm to provide estimates of the contribution of recollection and familiarity to recognition. In both experiments the data suggested that the WFE is primarily a recollection-based phenomenon. These findings suggest that the recognition memory WFE for old items results primarily from the effects of word frequency on recollection. The implications of these findings for theories of recognition memory are discussed.

Recognition as a Function of Word Frequency

In two experiments, subjects were asked to learn high and low frequency words, following which they were given a recognition test which employed either orthographic or general population distractors. Results revealed that although recognition test scores were higher for low frequency target words than for high when general population distractors were utilized, recognition test scores were higher for high frequency target words when orthographic distractors were used. It is suggested that the findings of earlier investigators who obtained results revealing superior recognition test scores for lowfrequency words were a function of the kind of distractors which were employed, and that any theory of recognition memory must take into consideration the fact that recognition scores are always related to the kinds of distractors which are used.

Frequency Interference in Children’s Recognition of Sentence Information

The thesis investigated here is that the particular alternatives supplied in a multiple-choice test comprise a powerful determinant of children’s measured achievement. Children listened to sentences under two different instructional sets (imagery rating and sentence repetition) and were later tested with multiple-choice alternatives: (a) either identical or similar in meaning to the originally presented correct items; and (b) either including or not including previously presented irrelevant information. Although the two instructional sets produced different overall levels of performance, the sources of interference anticipated from a theory of recognition memory were in evidence under both instructions. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.

Retrieval processes in recognition memory.

A method of analyzing reaction time data in recognition memory is presented, which uses an explicit model of latency distributions. This distributional method allows us to distinguish between processes in a way that the traditional measure, mean latency, can not. The behavior of latency distributions is described, and four experiments are reported that show how recognition accuracy and latency vary with independent variables such as study and test position, rate of presentation, and list length. These data are used to develop and test the empirical model. The resulting analyses, together with functional relationships derived from the experimental data, are used to test several theories of recognition memory. The theories examined all show problems in light of these stringent tests, and general properties required by a model to account for the data are suggested. As well as arguing for distributional analyses of reaction time data, this paper presents a wide range of phenomena that any theory of recognition memory must explain. Over the last few years, researchers have been developing theories of recognition memory based not only on accuracy measures but also on latency measures. In this article, we consider latency measures in recognition memory. Results from four experiments are presented, and an empirical model for latency distributions is developed. Latency distributions are shown to provide much more information than can be obtained from mean latency, the most common dependent variable in reaction time measurements. From this, a strong case is made for the study of distributional properties by showing how some current theories are inadequate or wrong when examined in the light of distributiona l analyses. These recent theories are further evaluated using functional relationships extracted from results of the four experiments presented.