Deanne L. Westerman

The attribution of perceptual fluency in recognition memory: the role of expectation

Abstract Three experiments investigate whether the influence of perceptual fluency on recognition memory depends on a perceptual match between study and test. The perceptual fluency of recognition test items was enhanced by briefly presenting a prime that matched the subsequent test item. Enhanced perceptual fluency increased positive recognition responses when the study and test were in the same sensory modality but not when the study and test were in different modalities. This interaction occurred only when modality was manipulated between subjects; when modality was manipulated within subjects, enhanced perceptual fluency increased positive recognition responses to all test items. An interaction between modality and perceptual fluency was also found using “counterfeit” study lists. The results suggest that the use of perceptual fluency as a heuristic in recognition memory depends on whether it is perceived as relevant to the recognition decision.

Processing fluency affects subjective claims of recollection

Previous studies that have used the remember-know paradigm to investigate subjective awareness in memory have shown that fluency manipulations have an impact on \ldknow\rd responses but not on \ldremember\rd responses (e.g., Rajaram, 1993), a finding typically accounted for by invoking inferential processing in judgments of familiarity but not of recollection. However, in light of several researchers’ criticisms of this procedure, as well as findings documenting the influence of processing fluency on various subjective judgments, the present study was conducted in order to investigate whether judgments of recollection might also be subject to inferential processes and not solely the product of conscious retrieval. When the standard remember-know procedure was used (Experiment 1), manipulations of perceptual fluency increased \ldknow\rd responses but had no effect on \ldremember\rd responses, replicating previous findings. However, when an independent ratings method was employed (Higham & Vokey, 2004), manipulations of perceptual fluency (Experiment 2) and conceptual fluency (Experiment 3) reliably increased claims of both familiarity and recollection, suggesting that the conclusion that fluency affects only \ldknow\rd responses may be an artifact of the standard remember-know procedure.

Change in perceptual form attenuates the use of the fluency heuristic in recognition.

Four experiments (totalN = 295) were conducted to determine whether within-modality changes in perceptual form between the study and the test phases of an experiment would moderate the role of the fluency heuristic in recognition memory. Experiment 1 showed that a change from pictures to words reduced the role of fluency in recognition memory. In Experiment 2, the same result was found using counterfeit study lists that supposedly consisted of pictures or words. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that changes in the font used to present the study and test words also attenuated the contribution of fluency to the recognition decision when font change was manipulated between subjects, but not within subjects. Results suggest that the fluency heuristic is subject to metacognitive control, since participants’ attributions of perceptual fluency depend on the perceived usefulness of fluency as a cue to recognition.

The fluency heuristic in recognition memory: The effect of repetition

Abstract Five experiments investigate whether the attribution of processing fluency to recognition memory depends on the amount of fluency that is expected from targets based on the frequency with which they appeared during an earlier study phase. Subjects studied targets either one or five times and then were given a recognition test that included a priming phase to enhance the fluency of half of the test items. Results showed that the priming phase had a greater influence on recognition responses when targets had been presented once than when they had been presented five times. However, an interaction between fluency and target frequency was found only when frequency was manipulated between-subjects. An interaction between the priming manipulation and target frequency was also found using a “counterfeit” manipulation of frequency, suggesting that attributions of fluency are adjusted according to subjects’ expectations for the amount of fluency that should result from previous experiences with a stimulus.

Source memory for unidentified stimuli.

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether participants have source memory for test stimuli that they cannot identify. Using a paradigm developed to investigate the phenomenon of recognition without identification (Peynircioglu, 1990), we found that even when participants could not identify a previously studied item, they nonetheless exhibited above-chance performance on a source discrimination task. Most surprising was that source accuracy for unidentified items was independent of old-new discrimination and not different from that of identified items. These results are interpreted as evidence that source memory is based on a continuous, as opposed to a threshold-like, process and suggest that recollection may, in some circumstances, contribute to the phenomenon of recognition without identification.

Are first impressions lasting impressions? An exploration of the generality of the primacy effect in memory for repetitions

In five experiments, we investigated the primacy effect in memory for repetitions (DiGirolamo & Hintzman, 1997), the finding that when participants are shown a study list that contains two very similar versions of the same stimulus, memory is biased in the direction of the version that was presented first. In the experiments reported, the generality of the effect was examined by manipulating the orientation and features of the repeated stimuli. The results confirmed that the effect is reliable when stimulus changes affect the accidental properties of the stimulus (properties of the stimulus that give information about distance or angle but do little to aid in identification). However, the effect was not found when changes were made to other aspects of the stimulus. The results suggest that the primacy effect in memory for repetitions is not robust across all stimulus changes and converge with previous findings that have demonstrated that such properties of stimuli as orientation and size are represented differently in memory than are other stimulus characteristics.

Fluency Effects in Recognition Memory: Are Perceptual Fluency and Conceptual Fluency Interchangeable?

On a recognition memory test, both perceptual and conceptual fluency can engender a sense of familiarity and elicit recognition memory illusions. To date, perceptual and conceptual fluency have been studied separately but are they interchangeable in terms of their influence on recognition judgments? Five experiments compared the effect of perceptual and conceptual fluency on recognition. The results suggest that under standard intentional encoding instructions participants were influenced by conceptual and perceptual fluency manipulations to a similar degree (Experiments 1a and 1b). When the perceptual features of the stimuli were emphasized during encoding, the perceptual fluency manipulation had a stronger influence on recognition memory decisions than the conceptual fluency manipulation (Experiment 2). Enhanced conceptual processing at encoding served to nullify the influence of both perceptual and conceptual fluency on the test (Experiment 3). The nature of the test instructions also influenced the relative contribution of perceptual versus conceptual fluency manipulations to the recognition judgment. In Experiment 4, the influence of conceptual fluency was larger when the recognition instructions were meaning based (a synonym recognition test) than with standard recognition instructions. Collectively, the results suggest that the relative contribution of perceptual and conceptual fluency depends on both encoding and test factors.

Can Fluency Be Interpreted as Novelty? Retraining the Interpretation of Fluency in Recognition Memory.

Stimuli that are processed fluently tend to be regarded as more familiar and are more likely to be classified as old on a recognition test compared with less fluent stimuli. Recently it was shown that the standard relationship between fluency and positive recognition judgments can be reversed if participants are trained that previously studied stimuli are associated with lower levels of fluency. Under such conditions, fluent stimuli are more likely to be classified as new on a recognition test (C. Unkelbach, 2006), which suggests that the interpretation of fluency is malleable and context dependent. Five experiments investigated the resilience of this reversed fluency effect. Using 2 different fluency manipulations, the finding of a reversed fluency effect after training was replicated. However, it was also found that the reversal depends on explicit feedback during training and is specific to the particular fluency manipulation used during training. Moreover, it was found that the reversal did not generalize to similar memory judgments. The balance of experimental results suggest that the standard interpretation of fluency as indicating higher levels of familiarity is quite stable and is resistant to reinterpretation.

Aging and fluency-based illusions in recognition memory.

We examined age-related differences in susceptibility to fluency-based memory illusions. The results from 2 experiments, in which 2 different methods were used to enhance the fluency of recognition test items, revealed that older and young adults did not differ significantly in terms of their overall susceptibility to this type of memory illusion. Older and young adults were also similar in that perceptual fluency did not influence recognition memory responses when there was a mismatch in the sensory modality of the study and test phases. Likewise, a more conceptual fluency manipulation influenced recognition memory responses in both older and young adults regardless of the match in modality. Overall, the results indicate that older adults may not be more vulnerable than young adults to fluency-based illusions of recognition memory. Moreover, young and older adults appear to be comparable in their sensitivity to factors that modulate the influence of fluency on recognition decisions.

Familiarity from orthographic information: Extensions of the recognition without identification effect

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of letter location information in recognition memory judgments. The experiments used the recognition without identification paradigm (Peynircioğlu, 1990), in which participants first attempt to identify the test item and then make a recognition decision as to whether or not the item was studied. In these studies, items that are not identified but that correspond to items that were presented are typically still rated as more likely to have been studied than those that were not presented. The present experiments demonstrated this finding with a variant of the conjunction lure paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were tested with word fragments that were made from the letters of two words. When the letters were from studied items, fragments were rated higher than when the test items were derived from two unstudied items, or one studied item and one unstudied item, suggesting that recognition without identification is prone to the same types of errors as recognition with identification. Results are discussed in terms of familiarity effects in recognition memory.