Rethinking familiarity: Remember/Know judgments in free recall

Abstract

Although frequently used with recognition, a few studies have used the Remember/Know procedure with free recall. In each case, participants gave Know judgments to a significant number of recalled items (items that were presumably not remembered on the basis of familiarity). What do these Know judgments mean? We investigated this issue using a source memory/free-recall procedure. For each word that was recalled, participants were asked to (a) make a confidence rating on a 5-point scale, (b) make a Remember/Know judgment, and (c) recollect a source detail. The large majority of both Remember judgments and Know judgments were made with high confidence and high accuracy, but source memory was nevertheless higher for Remember judgments than for Know judgments. These source memory results correspond to what is found using recognition, and they raise the possibility that Know judgments in free recall identify the cue-dependent retrieval of item-only information from an episodic memory search set. In agreement with this idea, we also found that the temporal dynamics of free recall were similar for high-confidence Remember and high-confidence Know judgments (as if both judgments reflected retrieval from the same search set). If Know judgments in free recall do in fact reflect the episodic retrieval of item-only information, it seems reasonable to suppose that the same might be true of high-confidence Know judgments in recognition. If so, then a longstanding debate about the role of the hippocampus in recollection and familiarity may have a natural resolution.

Do different tests of episodic memory produce consistent results in human adults?

“…Such a prospect relies on the assumption that these tests are all, in their own way, measures of some "core" episodic memory ability. The selfreport judgments described here, as well as the remember/know judgments in previous studies (e.g., Tulving 1985;Holland and Smulders 2011;Easton et al 2012;Mickes et al 2013) provide hope that this may, indeed, be the case, although further research is needed.…”

The two recollections.

“…Target recollection is presumably being experienced because these items were just read out of consciousness, but nevertheless, context recollection is unsuccess ful for a sizeable percentage. Mickes et al (2013) reported such findings for young adults. Their subjects recalled word lists and then made source judgments about recalled items, with source memory being inaccurate for 37% of recalled items.…”

“…Gomes (2014) reported further data on target-recollectionwithout-context-recollection in recall that mapped failures of con text recollection with independent measures of target recollection. Although, intuitively, recall involves target recollection, it has been proposed that some portion of it actually relies on nonrecol lective processes such as reconstruction (Brainerd, Reyna, & Howe, 2009) or familiarity (Mickes et al, 2013). To allow for that possibility, Gomes used the dual-retrieval model of recall to obtain independent estimates of recollective and nonrecollective retrieval for individual targets.…”

“…It is predicted by the dual-recollection hypothesis, however, and it is the comple ment of the recall illustrations of target-recollection-withoutcontext-recollection that we presented earlier. To recapitulate those illustrations, subjects exhibit no memory for contextual details that accompanied certain targets when the targets them selves are being recollected because they just read them out of consciousness on a recall test (Mickes et al, 2013;Shimamura & Squire, 1987). In the complementary source memory effect, sub jects are able to recollect contextual details that accompanied the presentation of certain targets when they cannot remember the targets themselves.…”

Fractionating controlled memory processes and recall of context in recognition memory: a case report

“…For instance, Jacoby, Toth and Yonelinas (1993) have stressed that recollection is a strategic process by which retrieval of specifics can bring to bear on the recognition decision. On the other hand, others, such as Mickes, Seale-Carlisle and Wixted (2013) stress that it is the production of material associated to a retrieval cue that characterises information as recollected. One such clear category of contextual information is source memory: the ability to retrieve features of memories that give rise to their episodic character (Mitchell & Johnson, Consistent with prevailing conceptions of recollection, neuropsychological studies report deficits both in source memory tasks and in paradigms emphasizing the strategic control requirement of recollection.…”