Cognitive Effort and Recollective Experience in Recognition Memory

Abstract

The difficulty of the cognitive operations required to process study items was manipulated in two experiments investigating recollective experience. In subsequent recognition tests, subjects indicated whether their recognition judgements for items processed in these tasks were based on recollection (“remember” responses) or on familiarity (“know” responses). In Experiment 1 target items were presented in the context of a category decision task. It was found that remember responses increased with the difficulty of the category decision. For positive instances, remember responses were greater for items of low instance frequency than for items of high instance frequency, while for negative instances remember responses were greater for items from similar categories than for items from dissimilar categories. These effects were not present in know responses. In Experiment 2, remember responses were more frequent when study items had been presented in the form of anagrams to be solved than when they had been presented in the form of words to be read aloud. The incidence of know responses was not affected by the format in which study items were presented. Source judgements were also more accurate when recognition was based on recollection. It is argued that the type of conscious awareness experienced during recognition is determined by the knowledge activated by items presented in the recognition test, which in turn is determined by the nature of the operations engaged at encoding.