Exploring the mental representation underlying familiarity assessment.

A new method was used to explore the role of perceptual information in familiarity-based recognition. The method uses a pairwise recognition task to compare recognition judgments to a test word when that word is related and unrelated to an immediately preceding word. If the false-alarm rate to the test word is greater when the two words are related, this is interpreted as reflecting an increase in the likelihood of positive familiarity assessment to the test word (Ngo, C. T., Sargent, J., & Dopkins, S. [2007]. Level of discrimination for recognition judgments reduced following the recognition of semantically related words. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 415-436. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.05.007). The occurrence of such an increase for a given sort of preceding word-test word relatedness is taken as indicating that information of the sort in question is involved in familiarity-based recognition. Whereas previous work with this method has failed to find evidence that perceptual information is involved in familiarity-based recognition, the present study observed such evidence, under conditions in which previous work with other methods suggested that perceptual information would be likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition. Thus, the study helped to validate the method and produced converging evidence that perceptual information is sometimes involved in familiarity-based recognition. The results of the study suggest that perceptual information is more likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition when the lists for the recognition task are short.Keywords: familiarity, recognition, perceptual, dual processDual process theories distinguish two aspects of recognition. First, an item may be recollected as having occurred previously in a certain context. Second, an item may be experienced as familiar in a sense that is detached from context (Jacoby, 1991; Mandler, 1991). Recognition on the basis of familiarity is of particular interest because it inhabits a gray area between explicit memory, in which past experience is consciously remembered, and implicit memory, in which past experience affects present behaviour, in the absence of awareness.Proponents of the dual process view disagree regarding the mental representation underlying familiarity-based recognition. In early work, the familiarity representation was seen as recording perceptual information (Mandler, 1980). In subsequent work, some writers have argued that this representation records only conceptual information (Brainerd, Reyna, & Mojardin, 1999). Other writers have argued that this representation records perceptual as well as conceptual information (Jacoby, 1991).The properties of the familiarity representation are of theoretical interest. An influential view of recognition holds that familiarity-based recognition reflects the long-term knowledge system whereas recollection reflects a system that preserves experience over the shorter term so that long-term knowledge can be adjusted to reflect this experience (McClelland, McNaughton, & O'Reilly, 1995; Norman & O'Reilly, 2003). Under this view, one would expect conceptual information to be more important than perceptual information in the familiarity representation.The empirical record regarding the familiarity representation is mixed. When perceptual and conceptual information have been pitted against one another, as potential bases for familiarity-based recognition, conceptual information has generally prevailed. Specifically, a number of studies have demonstrated higher levels of familiarity-based recognition following conceptual as opposed to perceptual processing at encoding. For example, the process dissociation procedure has been used to show higher levels of familiarity-based recognition following conceptual tasks (rating the pleasantness of words, solving anagrams, studying to-be-remembered items in pictorial form) than following perceptual tasks (counting syllables, rating the difficulty of generating rhymes to words, studying to-be-remembered items in word form; Jacoby, 1991; Toth, 1996; Wagner, Gabrieli, & Verfaellie, 1997; Yonelinas, 2001). …