The functional relation between recognition memory and conscious awareness was assessed in an experiment in which undivided attention at study was compared with two divided attention conditions, one more demanding than the other. When recognizing a word from the study list, subjects indicated whether they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence or recognized it on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection. Divided attention at study progressively impaired word recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. Recognition in the absence of conscious recollection was not affected by divided attention. These findings are interpreted as providing further support for the idea that recognition memory entails two distinct components, one based on associative and contextual information, the other based on a "traceless" awareness of familiarity.Recognition can be defined as what happens when an individual identifies a stimulus as having been encountered previously. Conscious awareness of recognition seems to take at least two distinct forms. A stimulus may evoke recognition when its oecurrence brings to mind some specific experience in which the stimulus was previously involved. Alternatively, a stimulus may give rise only to feelings of familiarity. For example, one can recognize a person as being familiar without remembering who the person is, or without being able to recollect anything about the person.A laboratory measure of these two kinds of conscious awareness is provided by Tulving's (1985b) distinction between "remember" and "know" responses. Word recognition measured by a "remember" response indicates that recognizing the word brings back to mind some conscious recollection of its prior oecurrence in the study list, such as an assoeiation or image it triggered, something about its position or appearance, or something of more personal significance. Recognition measured by a "know" response indicates that recognizing the word brings nothing else to mind-no assoeiation, no contextual information, no conscious recollection of its prior occurrence in the study list.Previous studies that have exploited these measures of conscious awareness in recognition memory have shown that they reflect distinct components in performance. Variables such as levels of proeessing, generate versus read, word frequency, and retention interval have influenced only recognition accompanied by recollective experience, as measured by "remember" responses; recognition in the absence of recollective experience, as measured by "know" responses, has been uninfluenced by any ofthese variables (Gardiner, 1988;Gardiner & Java, 1989. Motivated by the striking similarity between variables that dissoeiate "remember' and "know" judgments and those that dissoeiate explicit and implicit memory phenomena more generally, Gardiner and Java (1990; see also Gardiner, 1988) have suggested that the distinction between "remember" and "know" responding can be interpreted within a theoretical framework (Hayman & Tulving, 1989) that com...

This study examined the nature of verbal recognition memory in young and old subjects. Following presentation of a word list, subjects undertook a yes-no recognition test and indicated whether their decision was based on explicit recollection or assessment of familiarity. Explicit recollection declined with age, and familiarity-based recognition increased. Furthermore, the extent to which older subjects relied on familiarity-based recognition correlated with neuropsychological indices of frontal lobe dysfunction. A further experiment indicated that the change from explicit recollection to familiarity-based responding was unrelated to changes in older subjects' confidence about their memory. The data indicate the central role of frontal dysfunction in understanding age-related memory loss.

This article examines possible working memory deficits in 7-8-year-olds who are accurate readers but relatively poor comprehenders. In Expt 1, poor comprehenders scored below good comprehenders on a non-linguistic test of working memory (reading series of digits and recalling the last digit in each series) on the more taxing items. Experiment 2 examined the relationship between working memory and text comprehension using an anomaly resolution task. Good and poor comprehenders heard stories describing an adult's anomalous emotional response to a child's action, some of which contained information to resolve the anomaly. The load on working memory imposed by the need to integrate the resolution with the anomaly was varied in two ways: the resolution was presented immediately next to, or two sentences distant from, the anomaly, and appeared either before or after the anomaly. Poor comprehenders were worse than good ones at anomaly resolution only when the anomalous and resolving information were separated. The results support the hypothesis that text processing is influenced by working memory demands and suggest that children's comprehension is related to the efficiency of a general non-linguistic working memory system.

Two experiments explore the reminiscence bump (RB)--the disproportionately higher recall of early-life memories--by older adults. In Experiment 1, participants in the age ranges of 36-40, 46-50, and 56-60 recalled events freely or under instructions to avoid recent memories. Constraint did not affect older participants but resulted in the appearance of an RB in younger participants. In Experiment 2, recall was constrained to particular life periods. Memories from these periods were compared for ease of retrieval and along subjective dimensions (e.g. vividness). Memories from early life were more easily retrieved, but this was not due to differences in subjective qualities. A higher proportion of memories for first-time events were identified from early life, and these memories were more easily retrievable. The results are discussed in relation to an existing model of autobiographical memory, and a revised model is put forward.

In this article, we report two experiments that provide further evidence concerning the differential nature of implicit and explicit memory. In Experiment 1, subjects first undertook a sentenceverification task. While carrying out this task, half of the subjects were also required to carry out a secondary processing task involving tone monitoring. Twenty-four hours later, the subjects' memory for target items in the sentence-verification task was tested explicitly by means of a recognition task and implicitly by examining the extent to which the items primed fragment completion. Recognition performance was significantly impaired by the imposition of secondary processing demands during the original learning phase. In contrast, fragment completion was completely unaffected by this additional processing, even though substantial priming was observed. In Experiment 2, we examined whether priming in fragment completion is influenced by the nature of repetition during initial learning. Subjects studied a list of target items that were each repeated twice. Half the items were repeated immediately Gag 0) and half were repeated after six intervening items (lag 6). Memory for the items was assessed by recognition and by priming in fragment completion. Recognition was affected by lag, with lag 6 items being recognized better than lag 0 items. However, although significant priming was obtained, the extent of this priming was uninfluenced by lag. These data indicate two additional dimensions along which implicit and explicit memory differ and, furthermore, they support recent conceptualizations of processing differences underlying these two forms of memory.