Anne M. Cleary

Using ERPs to dissociate recollection from familiarity in picture recognition

Dual process theories posit that separate recollection and familiarity processes contribute to recognition memory. Previous research, testing recognition memory for words, indicates that event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can be used to dissociate recollection from familiarity. It has been hypothesized that the FN400 ERP old/new effect (300-500 ms) varies with stimulus familiarity, but the parietal ERP old/new effect (400-800 ms) varies with recollection. The results reported here are consistent with this hypothesis, extending it to the recognition of pictures when subjects had to discriminate between studied pictures, highly familiar lures (mirror-reversals of studied pictures), and new pictures. Furthermore, the parietal old/new effect showed significant recollection-related differences only for subjects with good behavioral discrimination between studied items and similar lures.

Orthography, phonology, and meaning: word features that give rise to feelings of familiarity in recognition.

In the present study, it is shown that participants can recognize test cues as resembling studied words even when these cues cannot be used to recall the words that they resemble. After studying a list of words, participants were given a cued recall test for which half of the cues resembled studied words on one particular feature dimension and half resembled nonstudied words on that dimension. In addition to trying to use each cue to recall a study list item, participants rated the degree to which the cue resembled a studied word. For those cues whose targets could not be identified, the mean rating was higher when the cues corresponded to studied items than when they corresponded to nonstudied items. Various types of features can give rise to this phenomenon, which was found when orthographic, phonemic, and semantic cued recall tasks were used. In all of these cases of recognition without recall, analysis of receiver operating characteristics revealed a pattern consistent with that of an equalvariance signal detection process.

Recognition without identification.

The ability of people to recognize words that they could not identify was examined. After studying a list of 15 words, participants completed a word fragment test consisting of 4-letter fragments of both studied and nonstudied words. Whether they were able to solve a particular fragment or not, participants then made an episodic recognition judgment. Even when participants were unable to solve a fragment, their recognition accuracy was significantly higher than chance. This effect was significant when list length was increased, when 2-letter fragments were used, when first letters were excluded from fragments, and when the letter casing and the presentation modality were changed from study to test. It also occurred when participants attempted to identify fragments at study and rated words at test. Recognition without identification is attributed to the use of orthographic information when determining the familiarity of a test item.

Can Déjà Vu Result from Similarity to a Prior Experience? Support for the Similarity Hypothesis of Déjà Vu

The strange feeling of having been somewhere or done something before—even though there is evidence to the contrary—is called déjà vu. Although déjà vu is beginning to receive attention among scientists (Brown, 2003, 2004), few studies have empirically investigated the phenomenon. We investigated the hypothesis that déjà vu is related to feelings of familiarity and that it can result from similarity between a novel scene and that of a scene experienced in one’s past. We used a variation of the recognition-without-recall method of studying familiarity (Cleary, 2004) to examine instances in which participants failed to recall a studied scene in response to a configurally similar novel test scene. In such instances, resemblance to a previously viewed scene increased both feelings of familiarity and of déjà vu. Furthermore, in the absence of recall, resemblance of a novel scene to a previously viewed scene increased the probability of a reported déjà vu state for the novel scene, and feelings of familiarity with a novel scene were directly related to feelings of being in a déjà vu state.

Using Wireless Response Systems to Replicate Behavioral Research Findings in the Classroom

College instructors are increasingly relying on wireless clicker systems as instructional tools in the classroom. Instructors commonly use clicker systems for such classroom activities as taking attendance, giving quizzes, and taking opinion polls. However, these systems are uniquely well suited for the teaching of psychology and other courses that emphasize behavioral research methods. Specifically, instructors can use the clicker system to engage students in an in-class replication of a known empirical phenomenon. This article describes 2 classroom demonstrations that reveal the usefulness of wireless clicker systems for replicating empirical phenomena in behavioral research.

Memory for detail in item versus associative recognition.

Some studies have shown that, although repetition increases the familiarity of a stimulus, it does not improve memory for its details. Because memory for associative information is thought to require memory for the details of study presentation, the effects of repetition on associative recognition were examined in the present study. The pattern of results was similar to that found for the recognition of item details: Repetition increased the familiarity of the individual items within each pair to a greater extent than it improved memory for their specific pairings.

Recognition without face identification

Recognition without identification is the finding that participants can recognize recognition test items as having been previously studied when the test items themselves are presented in such a way that their identification is hindered. The present study demonstrates this phenomenon in face recognition. Participants studied names of celebrities before receiving a recognition test containing pictures of celebrity faces. Half of the pictures were of celebrities whose names were studied; half were of celebrities whose names were not studied. Participants attempted to identify each face on the test and also rated the likelihood that each person’s name was studied. Among the faces that went unidentified, ratings discriminated between celebrities whose names were studied and celebrities whose names were not studied. This recognition without face identification effect is dependent upon the sense of being in a tip-of-the-tongue state for a particular name. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Extensions of the survival advantage in memory: examining the role of ancestral context and implied social isolation.

Recent work (e.g., Nairne & Pandeirada, 2010) has shown that words are remembered better when they have been processed for their survival value in a grasslands context than when processed in other contexts. It has been suggested that this is because human memory systems were shaped by evolution specifically to help humans survive. Thus far, the survival processing advantage has mainly been shown with grasslands contexts, which are thought to be particularly relevant to human evolution. The present study demonstrated the survival processing advantage with other contexts (e.g., lost in a jungle), including with contexts that should not, in and of themselves, be relevant to human evolution (e.g., lost in outer space). We further examined whether implied social isolation plays a critical role in the survival advantage to memory by comparing scenarios in which the person is alone versus with other people present (e.g., lost at sea alone or with others), and whether the perceived source of danger is social isolation or other human attackers. A survival advantage was shown in both the isolation and the group settings, and whether the primary source of danger was isolation or other human attackers did not matter. These findings suggest that the survival advantage in memory is not dependent on evolutionarily relevant physical contexts (e.g., grasslands) or particular sources of perceived danger (social isolation vs. perceived attackers), showing the advantage to be robust and applicable to a variety of scenarios.

Scene recognition without identification

Recognition without identification (RWI) is old-new discrimination among recognition test items that go unidentified. Recently, the effect has been shown in situations that require pre-experimental connections between unidentified studied items and their test cues, such as when the test cues are general knowledge questions and the unidentified studied items are their answers, or when the test cues are pictures of celebrities and the unidentified studied items are their names. In these cases, RWI demonstrates a peculiar relationship with tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences: Participants give higher recognition ratings when in a TOT state than when not, even though studying an item does not increase the probability of a TOT state for that item. The present study extends these findings to the recognition of scene information. We demonstrate a scene RWI effect with scenes when scene names cannot be retrieved, and replicate the previously reported relationship between TOT states and RWI. In addition, we show that the relationship between RWI and reported TOT states also occurs between RWI and reported déjà vu states with the test scenes.

Paradoxical effects of presentation modality on false memory.

Two experiments are reported in which the effects of presentation modality on false memory in recall and recognition are studied. False recall and recognition of critical targets are lower for non-presented items related to a study list when that study list is presented visually than when presented auditorily. This pattern of low levels of false memory for critical targets holds even when participants read the visually presented study items aloud. These results suggest that recollection of visual detail plays a role in the prevention of false memory. However, both the hit rates (true memory) and the false-alarm rates to weakly related distractors (non-critical targets) were higher for visual presentation than for auditory presentation, suggesting that more than one mechanism may underlie false recognition.