The revelation effect is a change in response behavior induced by a preceding problem-solving task. Previous studies have shown a revelation effect for faces when the problem-solving task includes attractiveness ratings of the faces. Immediately after this problem-solving task participants judged faces as more familiar than without the…

Among cues that fail to elicit successful recall, participants can still discriminate between cues that do and do not resemble studied items. This ability is referred to as recognition without cued recall (RWCR). We hypothesized that whereas recognition with cued recall is at least partly based on recalled studied information, RWCR results from a…

The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., pronounceable nonwords) tend to give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. The familiarity-based account attributes this effect to the fact that pseudowords lack distinctive semantic meanings, which increases the inter-item similarity of pseudowords compared to words and…

We investigated the development of dual-retrieval processes with a low-burden paradigm that is suitable for research with children and neurocognitively impaired populations (e.g., older adults with mild cognitive impairment or dementia). Rich quantitative information can be obtained about recollection, reconstruction, and familiarity judgment by…

In two experiments, participants studied word pairs and later discriminated old (intact) word pairs from foils, including recombined word pairs and pairs including one or two previously unstudied words. Rather than making old/new memory judgments, they chose one of five responses: (1) Old-Old (original), (2) Old-Old (rearranged), (3) Old-New, (4)…

Three experiments examined the effects of position distinctiveness, item familiarity, and frequency of presentation on serial position functions in a task involving reconstructing the order of a subset of 12 names in a list of 20 names. Three different serial position conditions were compared in which the subset of names occurred in Positions…

People report recognizing discourse inferences at rates that approach target acceptance. Brainerd et al. [Brainerd, C. J., Wright, R., Reyna, V. F., & Mojardin, A. H. (2001). "Conjoint recognition and phantom recollection." "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27", 307-329] proposed that…

In four experiments, the authors investigated whether two measures of associative recognition memory (associative identification and associative reinstatement) are dissociable from one-another on the basis of their reliance on strategic retrieval and are dissociable from item recognition memory. Experiment 1 showed that deep encoding of relational…

The subjective likelihood model [SLiM; McClelland, J. L., & Chappell, M. (1998). Familiarity breeds differentiation: a subjective-likelihood approach to the effects of experience in recognition memory. "Psychological Review," 105(4), 734-760.] and the retrieving effectively from memory model [REM; Shiffrin, R. M., & Steyvers, M. (1997). A model…

When people perform a recognition memory task, they may avail themselves of different forms of information. For example, they may recall specific learning episodes, or rely on general feelings of familiarity. Although subjective familiarity is often valid, it can make people vulnerable to memory illusions. Research using verbal materials has shown…

Conjunction errors occur when participants incorrectly identify as "old" novel test stimuli created by recombining parts of two study stimuli (parent items). Prior studies have reported that the conjunction error rate is higher when parent items are studied together than when they are studied apart (a parent proximity effect). In several…