Recollection and familiarity for words and faces: a study comparing Remember–Know judgements and the Process Dissociation Procedure

ABSTRACT

Measures of recollection and familiarity often differ depending on the paradigm utilised. Remember–Know (R–K) and Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP) methods have been commonly used but rarely compared within a single study. In the current experiments, R–K and PDP were compared by examining the effect of attention at study and time to respond at test on recollection and familiarity using the same experimental procedures for each paradigm. We also included faces in addition to words to test the generality of the findings often obtained using words. The results from the R–K paradigm revealed that recollection and familiarity were similarly affected by attention at study and time to respond at test. However, in the case of PDP, the measures of recollection and familiarity showed a different pattern of results. The effects observed for recollection were similar to those obtained with the R–K method, whereas familiarity was affected by time to respond but not by attention at study. These results are discussed in relation to the controlled-automatic processing distinction and the contribution of each paradigm to research on recognition memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Recollection and familiarity
• Remember–Know paradigm
• Process Dissociation Procedure
• attention
• response-signal procedure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We were interested in evaluating whether estimates of recollection and familiarity derived from R-K and PDP paradigms differ when procedural details are held constant. As such, we opted to use what might be referred to as “standard” versions of the two paradigms, which differ on a number of grounds. In other words, we did not attempt to make the PDP and R-K paradigms as similar as possible by, for example, using a one-step decision process in the R-K paradigm. According to such one-step methods, participants might be asked to make a remember/know/new judgement in a single step, whereas in the standard two-step method participants first make an old/new judgement and then make a remember/know decision for items previously judged old. As the PDP paradigm also involves a single recognition decision at test, it could be argued that a one-step R-K method would be more similar than the standard two-step R-K method to the conventional PDP method. However, any attempt to equate the two paradigms would run entirely counter to our primary objective; to examine whether idiosyncratic procedural differences or fundamental paradigm differences are responsible for the different effects observed across the two paradigms. Again, to address this issue, our strategy was to eliminate the idiosyncratic procedural differences associated with manipulations of attention at study and time to respond at test while leaving fundamental paradigm differences between R-K and PDP intact.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science [grant number AP2002–2454] and Junta de Andalucía [grant number P09-HUM-5422].