Recognition memory for source and occurrence: The importance of recollection

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 30; no. 6; pp. 893 - 907
• Main Authors: QUAMME, Joel R, FREDERICK, Christina, KROLL, Neal E. A, YONELINAS, Andrew P, DOBBINS, Ian G
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01-09-2002; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Face; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Learning. Memory; Memory; Models, Psychological; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recognition; Recognition (Psychology); ROC Curve; Human; Memory retrieval; Recognition memory; Information source; Memory; Receiver operating characteristic curves; Stimulus familiarity; Cognition; Experimental study; Signal detection
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03195775

Previous recognition memory studies indicate that when both recollection and familiarity are expected to contribute to recognition performance (e.g., discriminating studied items from nonstudied items) the dual-process and the unequal-variance signal detection models provide comparable accounts of performance. When familiarity is not expected to be useful (e.g., when items from two equally familiar sources are discriminated between), the dual-process model provides a significantly better account of performance. In the present study, source recognition was tested under conditions in which familiarity could have been used to perform a list-discrimination task; participants were required to discriminate between strong studied items, weak studied items, and new items. The dual-process model provided a better account of performance than did the unequal-variance model. Moreover, the results indicated that the unequal-variance assumption in a single-process signal detection model was not a valid substitution for recollection and that recollection was used to make recognition judgments even when assessments of familiarity were useful.