Deanne L. Westerman - US grants

Recognition memory is the process of determining whether or not an event occurred in the past. A full understanding of the processes that underlie recognition memory are central to our understanding of many important topics such as the reliability of eyewitness memory, and reports of childhood memories, as well as memory disorders such as amnesia and the symptoms associated with Alzheimer's disease. Recently a great deal of progress has occurred in the development of formal models of recognition memory. Many of these models assume that recognition judgments are based on a single familiarity process. However, there is evidence that a slower recall-like process, which is termed recollection, contributes to recognition performance in certain cases. Two cases that have been theorized to involve recollection rather than relying exclusively on familiarity are associative-recognition and plurality recognition. In the case of associative recognition, evidence that judgments are based on recollection is indirect and consists primarily of the dissociations found between item-recognition and associative-recognition across several variables (e.g., word frequency the time course, of forgetting, the time course of retrieval. These dissociations have led several researchers to suggest that Global-Matching Models may need to be modified to include a second recall-like retrieval process. The purpose of this study is to test directly the role of familiarity on both associative-recognition and plurality recognition by manipulating the familiarity of the test items. The familiarity of the test items will be enhanced through priming and through the manipulation of the perceptual fluency of test items ., 999Because familiarity is generally assumed to be a fast and automatic process and recollection is assumed to be a slower and more effortful process, the effect of enhanced familiarity on these tasks will also be studied under both speeded (i.e., participants will be required to respond quickly to a test item) and non-speeded (i.e., self-paced) testing conditions. The results of these studies will allow a comparison of the role of familiarity in item recognition, associative-recognition and plurality recognition to better understand the processes that underlie each type of task and to assess the adequacy of models of recognition memory that postulate a single familiarity assessment process.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recognition memory is the ability to discriminate between events that have and have not occurred in the past. A thorough understanding of recognition memory is essential to many important topics, such as eyewitness memory, memories of traumatic events, and memory disorders such as amnesia and the symptoms associated with Alzheimer's disease. All current theories of recognition memory propose that recognition performance is based on the assessed familiarity of a stimulus, with greater levels of familiarity increasing the probability that an item will be classified as "old" on a recognition memory test. One factor that contributes to the assessed familiarity of a stimulus is the speed and ease with which that stimulus is perceived--a factor that has been termed perceptual fluency (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981). Stimuli that are perceived fluently are more likely to be called "old" on a recognition test compared to stimuli that are perceived less fluently, regardless of whether they are old or new. It is theorized that the relationship between perceptual fluency and recognition memory is mediated by an attributional process whereby perceptual fluency is interpreted as a sign of previous experience with a stimulus. The primary question that is addressed in this proposal is whether the attributional process that mediates the role fluency in recognition is sensitivity to the relevance of perceptual fluency as a sign of prior occurrence. The results of numerous experiments investigating the relative size of perceptual priming effects as a function of differences in the perceptual form of targets and lures suggest that perceptual fluency is more relevant as a sign of prior experience in situations in which there is a perceptual match between the first and subsequent presentations of a stimulus (e.g., Blaxton, 1989; Rajaram & Roediger, 1993; Weldon, 1991). Therefore, the perceptual match between the study and test phases of recognition memory experiments will be manipulated in the proposed experiments. Eleven experiments are described. In all experiments, the perceptual fluency of a portion of the test items is enhanced through priming. The results of Experiments 1-3 (total N = 168) provide pilot data that demonstrate that the role of perceptual fluency in recognition depends on the sensory match between the study and test phases of the experiment. Eight additional experiments are proposed that will a.) further investigate how variations in perceptual form between the study and test phases of the experiment moderate the influence of perceptual fluency in recognition memory b.) examine alternate theoretical accounts for experimental results and c.) investigate potential differenced between the role of fluency in recognition and other types of judgments.