Test context affects recollection and familiarity ratings: implications for measuring recognition experiences.
The binary remember/know task requires participants to dichotomize their subjective recognition experiences into those with recollection and those only with familiarity. Many variables have produced dissociative effects on remember/know judgments. In contrast, having participants make independent recollection/familiarity ratings has consistently produced parallel effects, suggesting the dissociations may be artifacts of using binary judgments. Bodner and Lindsay (2003) reported a test-list context effect with binary judgments: Increased remembering but decreased knowing for a set of critical items tested with a set of less-memorable (vs. more-memorable) items. Here we report a parallel effect of test-list context on recollection and familiarity ratings, induced by a shift in response bias. We argue that independent ratings are preferable to binary judgments because they allow participants to directly report the co-occurrence of recollection and familiarity for each item. Implications for the measurement of self-reported recognition experiences, and for accounts of recognition memory, are discussed.
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada.
Cody
C
Tousignant
Glen E
GE
Bodner
D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis