Dissociating familiarity from recollection using rote rehearsal

Abstract

Recollection-based recognition memory judgments benefit greatly from effortful elaborative encoding, whereas familiarity-based judgments are much less sensitive to such manipulations. In this study, we have examined whether rote rehearsal under divided attention might produce the opposite dissociation, benefiting familiarity more than recollection. Subjects rehearsed word pairs during the "distractor" phase of a working memory span task, and were then given a surprise memory test for the distractor items at the end of the experiment. Experiment 1 demonstrated that increasing rehearsal elevated the recognition rate for intact and rearranged pairs, but neither associative recognition accuracy nor implicit fragment completion benefited from rehearsal. The results suggest that rote rehearsal leads to a greater increase in familiarity than in recollection, and that the increase in observed familiarity cannot be attributed to effects of repetition priming. In Experiment 2, we tested item recognition with the remember/know procedure, and the results supported the conclusions of Experiment 1. Moreover, a signal detection model of remember/know performance systematically overpredicted rehearsal increases in remember rates, and this worsened when high-rehearsal items were assumed to be more variable in strength. The results suggest that rote rehearsal can dissociate familiarity from recollection at the time of encoding and that item recognition cannot be fully accommodated within a one-dimensional signal detection model.

Directed Forgetting in High-Functioning Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…As the Remember/Know paradigm has also been used to establish a dissociation of the effects of rehearsal, with elaborative rehearsal selectively affecting Remember responses and maintenance rehearsal selectively affecting Know responses (Dobbins et al 2004;Gardiner et al 1994;Gardiner and Richardson-Klavehn 2000), these findings also are consistent with the notion that the adults with AS engage in less elaborative rehearsal than TD adults. As yet, there is no conclusive evidence to link the episodic memory impairments in this population specifically to the rehearsal styles employed.…”

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

“…The hemispheric asymmetry we observed is consistent with our hypothesis that reconstruction vs. distance processes are similar to recollection vs. familiarity processes, respectively, which have been previously associated with left vs. right PFC activations (Dobbins, Kroll, et al, 2004;Eldridge, et al, 2000;Henson, et al, 1999). For example, Henson et al (1999) used the "remember-know" procedure (Tulving, 1985) to determine when memory is accompanied by contextual details ("remember" judgment) versus when it is not ("know" judgment), as based on participant introspections.…”

“…The finding of right DL-PFC activity in association with long lags is consistent with functional neuroimaging evidence linking this region to familiarity (Dobbins, Kroll, & Yonelinas, 2004;Eldridge, et al, 2000;Henson, et al, 1999). A related interpretation of these right PFC activations is that they reflect an increase in monitoring for items that are close to the response criterion (Henson, et al, 2000).…”

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Promotes Long-Term Memory Formation through Its Role in Working Memory Organization

“…There were too few rehearse trials with two or three subsequently recollected items to conduct the same type of subsequent memory analysis that was performed for reorder trials (see supplemental material, available at www.jneurosci.org). This is not surprising, because previous studies have shown that rote maintenance rehearsal promotes memory performance primarily by building item strength in a manner that supports overall recognition, rather than recollection (Greene, 1987;Dobbins et al, 2004). We therefore investigated the relationship between prefrontal activity during the memory delay on rehearse trials and subsequent item recognition memory, collapsing across remember and know responses.…”

“…Given that both WM maintenance (Greene, 1987;Dobbins et al, 2004; and organizational processing (Tulving and Pearlstone, 1966;Bower, 1970;Sternberg and Tulving, 1977;Hunt and Einstein, 1981;Davachi and Wagner, 2002) promote LTM formation, both DLPFC and VLPFC activity at encoding should be correlated with successful LTM performance. Figure 1 and Table 1 summarize results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that compared lateral prefrontal activity during encoding of items that were remembered on a subsequent memory test with activity elicited by subsequently forgotten items.…”