The components of recollective experience: Remembering and knowing
Roediger, Henry L., III
Doctor of Philosophy
This project was designed to examine the nature of recollective experience. Gardiner (1988) showed dissociations are obtained within an explicit memory test as a function of several independent variables when subjects classify recognized items into two types of recollection, one termed "Remember" (those items that subjects consciously recollect from the study list) and the other termed "Know" (those items that subjects recognize on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection). Gardiner and his colleagues concluded from their results that "Remember" responses are sensitive to conceptual and "Know" responses to perceptual processing. The present investigation tested this conclusion using the recognition memory task. In Experiment 1 subjects produced semantic associates to some and rhyme associates to other study items. Levels-of-processing effects were observed for recognition and "Remember" judgments. For "Know" judgments, this effect was reversed. A modality match (visual - visual) between study and test events had no effect relative to a modality mismatch (auditory - visual) condition. In Experiment 2, subjects studied pictures and words. The picture superiority effect was obtained for recognition and "Remember" judgments and was reversed for "Know" judgments. In Experiment 3, in the recognition phase, half the studied and nonstudied words were preceded by a brief (50 ms) and masked repetition, and the other items were preceded by masked presentations of unrelated words. Masked repetition enhanced recognition and "Know" responses, but did not affect "Remember" responses. In Experiment 4, subjects made confidence judgments ("Sure"/"Not Sure") to primed or unprimed recognized items. The pattern of priming effects for "Sure"/"Not Sure" responses and "Remember"/"Know" responses (Experiment 3) were dissimilar. In Experiment 5, the primes in the recognition test list were semantically related or unrelated to the test words and were presented longer than repeated primes (SOA = 250 ms). The semantic priming effect was observed only for nonstudied items and was distributed equivalently between "Remember" and "Know" judgments. These results: (1) indicate that "Remember" and "Know" responses are sensitive to conceptual and perceptual factors respectively, (2) provide support for the two-factor theories of recognition memory, and (3) show that "Remember" responses are a "purer" measure of conscious recollection than standard explicit memory tests.