Recollective Experience Following Suppression of Focal Attention

Abstract

Studies that have adopted an experiential approach to memory and awareness have shown that several variables produce dissociations between "remember" and "know" responses, although judgements of recollective experience are made in explicit memory tasks. However, there have been few studies in which a given variable has been found to affect knowing but not remembering, although a number of studies have shown the opposite pattern of results. The present study increases the generality of these findings by showing that dividing attention (by suppressing the processing of foveal information) facilitates knowing, but not remembering. The results support the notion that know judgements are dissociable from remember judgements, and that recognition in the absence of recollective experience is influenced by manipulations that emphasise perceptual processing.