Contributions of familiarity and recollection rejection to recognition: Evidence from the time course of false recognition for semantic and conjunction lures

Abstract

It has been suggested that both familiarity and recollection contribute to the recognition decision process. In this paper, we leverage the form of false alarm rate functions-in which false-alarm rates describe an inverted U-shaped function as the time between study and test increases-to assess how these processes support retention of semantic and surface form information from previously studied words. We directly compare the maxima of these functions for lures that are semantically related and lures that are related by surface form to previously studied material. This analysis reveals a more rapid loss of access to surface form than to semantic information. To separate the contributions of item familiarity and reminding-induced recollection rejection to this effect, we use a simple multinomial process model; this analysis reveals that this loss of access reflects both a more rapid loss of familiarity and lower rates of recollection for surface form information. Keywordsrecognition; familiarity; reminding; recollection rejection; conjunction lures; semantic lures; multinomial process modeling Recent memory research incorporates a prominent role for understanding the ways in which misremembering, as well as remembering, can inform memory theory (Gallo, 2006;Roediger, 1996). Within recognition memory, evaluating the relationships between studied stimuli and test stimuli and the conditions that promote false remembering reveals a great deal about the encoding strategies (Matzen & Benjamin, 2009), decision processes (Benjamin, 2001;Miller & Wolford, 1999), and representations that support recognition (cf. Brainerd, Reyna, Wright, & Mojardin, 2003;Brainerd & Reyna, 2001). This paper adds to the literature on memory errors by using them to investigate the time courses of two component processes that are thought to contribute to recognitionfamiliarity and recollection rejection. Specifically, we compare these two processes for lures that are semantically related to studied words as opposed to lures that share surface features NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptMemory. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 January 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript(syllables with the same orthography) but not semantic features with studied words. Previous research suggests that differences in how semantic and surface form information are processed at study (Matzen & Benjamin, 2009) and at test (Odegard, Lampinen, & Toglia, 2005) play a crucial role in determining how susceptible people will be to different types of memory errors. Comparing the time courses of familiarity and recollection rejection for lures that are related to studied items by shared semantics or shared surface features allows us to draw novel conclusions about the time course of item information decay and the processes underlying that decay. Through experimental evidence and modeling, we lay out a theory about the relationship between familiarity and recollection that accounts for the joint set of false alarm func...

Internal versus external features in triggering the brain waveforms for conjunction and feature faces in recognition

“…As mentioned in the introduction, conjunction items are lures that are similar or related to studied faces and may be falsely recognized as old on the basis of familiarity [11,12,14]. The analyses showed that the waveform differences between conjunction and new faces distributed over frontal, central, and parietal cortical regions, and the occurrence of such differences were relatively later (∼900 ms after stimulus onset) compared with those between the old and the new faces (roughly 300 ms).…”

“…Recently, the discriminations of the stimuli that are composed of a mixture of features from previous actually presented items have received renewed interest with the use of the feature-conjunction paradigm [10][11][12]. For instance, participants might study the items such as keyboard and foxhole, and then in a recognition test, they are required to discriminate the compound words, such as keyhole (both parts old but recombined) or blackboard (partly old), and the entirely new words, from the old words that have been encountered in the previous study list.…”

“…The higher false proportions to conjunction and feature lures than to new items have been referred to as the conjunction effect and the feature effect, respectively [13,14]. As such, when a conjunction or a feature item is identified as new, the process is often referred to as recollection-based rejection; otherwise, the process is characterized as reflecting the result of familiarity [10][11][12]14]. As such, when a conjunction or a feature item is identified as new, the process is often referred to as recollection-based rejection; otherwise, the process is characterized as reflecting the result of familiarity [10][11][12]14].…”

What happened (and what did not): Discourse constraints on encoding of plausible alternatives

“…Enhancing memory for the correct proposition might also help readers reject the lures by process of elimination (the phenomenon of recollection rejection; Brainerd, Reyna, & Estrada, 2006; Matzen, Taylor, & Benjamin, 2011), but it should not do so exclusively for particular types of probes. That is, superior memory for the true proposition should help reject both the alternative lure ( French ) and the unmentioned lure ( Portuguese ).…”

Representational explanations of “process” dissociations in recognition: The DRYAD theory of aging and memory judgments.

“…Note that the peak of the curve shifts further to the left as the density of the context representation increases (Matzen, Taylor, & Benjamin, 2009). This finding indicates that, with greater representational density, a lower probability of recovering an individual feature is sufficient to support disambiguation of the context.…”