Know versus Familiar: Differentiating states of awareness in others’ subjective reports of recognition

Abstract

In the Remember–Know paradigm whether a Know response is defined as a high-confidence state of certainty or a low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers and can influence participants’ responses. The current experiment was designed to explore differences between the states of Know and Familiar. Participants studied others’ justification statements to “Know” recognition decisions and separated them into two types. Crucially, participants were not provided definitions of Know and Familiar on which to sort the items—their judgements were based solely on the phenomenology described in the justifications. Participants’ sorting decisions were shown to reliably map onto expert classification of Know and Familiar. Post-task questionnaire responses demonstrated that both the level of memory detail and confidence expressed in the justifications were central to how participants categorised the items. In sum, given no instructions to do so, participants classify Familiar and Know according to two dimensions: confidence and amount of information retrieved.

Keywords:

• Remember–Know
• Subjective experience
• Familiarity
• Dual-process
• Recognition

This work derives from discussions at the ESRC-CNRS collaborative programme awarded to Moulin (Recollection, Remembering and the Complex Nature of the Self; RES-170-25-0008). The data were collected at the University of Leeds for Williams's Ph.D., funded by a University Research Scholarship, and the manuscript was written while Williams held a Commonwealth Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Victoria funded by the Government of Canada. The authors thank Mike Masson for his advice on the analysis.

This work derives from discussions at the ESRC-CNRS collaborative programme awarded to Moulin (Recollection, Remembering and the Complex Nature of the Self; RES-170-25-0008). The data were collected at the University of Leeds for Williams's Ph.D., funded by a University Research Scholarship, and the manuscript was written while Williams held a Commonwealth Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Victoria funded by the Government of Canada. The authors thank Mike Masson for his advice on the analysis.

Notes

¹ We are grateful for John Gardiner's permission to use these stimuli.

² As one of Gardiner et al.'s (1998) participants did not provide two Know justifications, one Know statement was duplicated and included twice: Bluebell “I am sure about that one, there were a couple of words which were similar and were part of the category flower”.

³ A corresponding ANOVA comparing confidence ratings given to Know and Familiar justifications by participants who had or had not endorsed “more sure” did not demonstrate significant main effects of endorsement or justification type and no significant interaction (all p > .25). Although the means showed the same pattern as the ANOVA split by “confidence”, for “more sure” only 16 participants had not endorsed this criterion resulting in uneven group sizes for ANOVA.

⁴ Around 50% of participants also endorsed “more sure” and “deeper level of processing” as sorting criteria. Although no follow-up questionnaire items examined these criteria, in line with our previous findings (Williams et al., 2013), endorsement of these criteria shows that when asked about the nature of others’ recognition memory, people use a variety of factors to differentiate categories of subjective experience.