Functional aspects of recollective experience

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 309 - 313
• Main Author: Gardiner, John M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.07.1988
• Subjects: Adult; Awareness; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition; Cognitive Processes; Conditioning; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Learning. Memory; Memory; Mental Recall; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Semantics; Verbal Learning; Word Recognition and Discrimination; Human; Verbal learning; Language; Semantics; Information processing; Memory layout; Consciousness unconsciousness; Mnemonic recognition; Generation effect; Episodic memory
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03197041

The functional relationship between recognition memory & conscious awareness was examined in two experiments in which Ss (N = 32 & 40 undergraduates, respectively) indicated when recognizing a word whether or not they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence in the study list. Both levels of processing & generation effects were found to occur only for recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. Recognition in the absence of conscious recollection, although less likely, was generally reliable & uninfluenced by encoding conditions. These results are consistent with dual-process theories of recognition, which assume that recognition & priming in implicit memory have a common component. They strengthen the case for making a functional distinction between episodic memory & other memory systems. 2 Figures, 16 References. HA