Making sense of memory.

Abstract The current work explores how people make recognition and belief judgments in the presence of obvious repetition primes. In two experiments, subjects received a 200-ms prime ("cheetah"), either before or after reading a trivia question ("What is the fastest animal?") but always before being presented with the target answer ("cheetah"). Results showed that repetition priming decreased "old" claims (Recognition - Experiment 1), while it increased truth claims (Belief - Experiment 2). Furthermore, repetition prime placement affected recognition but not belief. Combined, these results suggest that dissociations in memory performance are a natural outcome of task and processing demands and reflect the dynamic, flexible nature of memory. There is no part of mind, no thought or feeling or memory or imagination, that we can catch at rest and watch unchanged; thought and feeling are changing, moving, shifting from instant to instant. (Titchener, 1899, p. 7) Much evidence points to a qualitative difference between "remembering" a specific event in time (e.g., I walked in the park yesterday), and "believing" that something is true (e.g., the capital of Norway is Oslo) (Tulving, 1972, 1983, 2002). According to Tulving (1983), remembering an event is thought to be place, time and context dependent, and is controlled by the episodic memory system. Believing that something is true, in contrast, results from the accumulation of information over time, is largely context independent, and has been ascribed to the semantic memory system. Since Tulving's (1972) original conceptualization of the episodic/semantic memory distinction, several additional memory systems have been posited. These include the procedural and declarative systems (Cohen & Squire, 1980), implicit and explicit memory systems (Graf & Schacter, 1985), the perceptual representation system (Tulving, Schacter, & Stark, 1982), and the primary (working) memory system (Schacter & Tulving, 1994). As an alternative to structural accounts that classify memory by types or systems, several theorists have opted to explain performance differences on various memory tasks as resulting from the specific processing operations required by those tasks (e.g., Kolers, 1973; Kolers & Roediger, 1984). Processing or attribution accounts attempt to illuminate the particular processing demands of a given task, in addition to the relative match between processing experiences present at both encoding and retrieval (e.g., Blaxton, 1989; Masson & MacLeod, 1992; Morris, Bransford, & Franks, 1977; Tulving & Thomson, 1972). The present work aims to show that performance differences on memory tasks can be understood by closely examining the processing requirements of those tasks. The present work is not aimed at presenting a critical test between structural and processing theories of memory. The Effect of Repetition on Recognition and Belief Working squarely within the attribution camp, Jacoby and Whitehouse (1989) demonstrated that processing fluency (speed of processing) and its subsequent attribution to a particular source depend upon the availability of potential sources to explain that fluency (see also Higham & Vokey, 2000). Subjects studied words for a standard recognition task. Later, words were presented after repetition or nonrepetition context (prime) words (e.g., "duck - duck" vs. "ring - duck"). Repetition primed words increased the speed with which subjects processed target words (referred to as fluency, resulting in a feeling of familiarity that arises from the attribution of fluency to the past). However, subjects attributed this familiarity to different sources to the repetition prime or to training - depending on whether or not they were aware of the prime words. Additional work supports the fluency attribution account of familiarity (e.g., Jacoby, Kelley, & Dywan, 1989; Lindsay & Kelley, 1996; although see Whittlesea & Williams, 2001). …