Conjunction errors in recognition: Emergent structure and metacognitive control

Facial Recall: Feature–Conjunction Effects in Source Retrieval Versus Item Recognition

“…As noted, our confirmation of a significant conjunction effect in item recognition memory testing replicates findings from a great many previous studies using words, pictures, and faces as stimuli (Arndt & Jones, 2008; Bartlett et al., 2009; Danielsson et al., 2006; Hannigan & Reinitz, 2000; Jones, 2005; Jones & Atchley, 2002, 2006, 2008; Jones & Jacoby, 2001; Lloyd, 2013; Mckone & Peh, 2006; Nie et al., 2014; Verde, 2010; Wong & Rotello, 2010), demonstrating that this effect is not stimulus specific. Jones and Atchley (2002) argued that this conjunction effect may be explained in part by a failure to transfer conceptual information from initial facial presentations during “study phase” to subsequent testing caused by longer retention intervals.…”

“…Nonverbal stimuli, like pictures and faces, have been adopted in studies of conjunction and feature effects, finding robust conjunction and feature effects (Bartlett, Shastri, Abdi, & Neville-Smith, 2009; Danielsson et al., 2006; Hannigan & Reinitz, 2000; Jones & Bartlett, 2009; Jones et al., 2006; Lloyd, 2013; Mckone & Peh, 2006; Nie, Jiang, & Fu, 2014; Verde, 2010). For faces, there are three commonly used conjunctions: (a) a typical combination of external features (e.g., hairstyle, ears, chin, jaw, cheek, and facial contour) of a previously encountered face and internal features (e.g., forehead, eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth) of another previously encountered face; (b) an irregular combination of the external features and nose of one previously studied face and the eyes and mouth of another separate studied face; and (c) an internal feature combination of the eyes and eyebrows of one studied face and the nose and mouth of another studied face, while all external features are removed (Bartlett et al., 2009; Jones & Bartlett, 2009; Jones et al., 2006; Jones & Jacoby, 2001; Nie et al., 2014).…”

Reducing the familiarity of conjunction lures with pictures.

“…It may be that the two-picture condition in the present study, because of its focus on the elements of the compound word, was akin to that of the different scene condition. Similar to the conclusions of Verde (2010), the present experiments suggest that familiarity comes from both the component parts and the compound word as a whole. Participants who only study a single-picture with a compound word seem to find conjunction items less familiar, as demonstrated by a failure to recognize the parts when asked (Experiment 2) or to increase error rates under time pressure (Experiment 3).…”

“…The encoding manipulation of single versus two pictures that was utilized in the present study is similar to that used to investigate patterns of recognition memory for scene pairs that were either from the same scene or two different scenes (Verde, 2010). The results of this study demonstrated that false alarms were higher for different-scene pictures than same-scene pictures.…”