Effects of Familiarity Level and Repetition on Recognition Accuracy

Abstract

Theories of recognition memory based on signal detection theory posit that a recognition decision is similar to a psychophysical judgment. Like a judgment of stimulus brightness or loudness, a recognition judgment is based on the value of a unidimensional signal computed for the test item. This signal has been called the strength or familiarity value. One prediction of these models is that the ability to discriminate between a studied and nonstudied test item depends on the ability to detect the difference in their familiarities. This ability in turn is influenced by the items' familiarity levels; discrimination should become more difficult as the familiarity of both items increases. This prediction was supported in 3 experiments using a forced-choice procedure. Also, accuracy was higher when the list contained repeated items rather than a comparable number of distinct items.

The effects of healthy aging, amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease on recollection, familiarity and false recognition, estimated by an associative process-dissociation recognition procedure

“…The groups  repetition conditions interaction was not significant (F 3,128 o1), which indicates a constant increase in familiarity with the stimulus repetition in the four samples (Tussing and Green, 2001), again supporting the sensitivity of our procedure for detecting this manipulation.…”

“…3). It is well known that in young people, pair repetition increases the hit rates for intact pairs because it strengthens the association between the two items and increases the activation of each item, making the pair more accessible to recognition (Kilb and Naveh-Benjamin, 2011;Tussing and Green, 2001). In healthy older people, pair repetition also increases their hit rates for intact pairs, but to a lesser extent than in young people, as they show deficits in both encoding (the associativebinding deficit hypothesis; see the meta-analysis by Old and Naveh-Benjamin (2008), for a review) and in recollection-based recognition, and they tend to rely more on the activation of the items (increased by repetitions; e.g.…”

“…Finally, patients with cognitive impairment should show a more significant deficit in their hit rates for intact pairs because they are impaired in both recollection-based and familiarity-based recognition (Gallo et al, 2004). Nevertheless, pair repetition also increases false recognition, especially in healthy older people, as stimulus repetition increases the familiarity of the items (Tussing and Green, 2001), leading to more false alarms on rearranged pairs (Light et al, 2004;Rhodes et al, 2008). However, young adults, as their recollection-based recognition ability is intact, use practice to enhance recollection and reduce their false alarm rates on rearranged pairs (e.g., using the "recall-to-reject" strategy, which involves rejecting a non-studied XY lure pair because the participant can consciously recollect that stimulus X was associated with stimulus Z during the study task, and not with stimulus Y; see Abe et al (2011), Cohn et al (2008 and Gallo et al (2004)).…”

Category length produces an inverted-U discriminability function in episodic recognition memory

“…But even if that were so, according to unelaborated itemnoise models, d a should monotonically decrease with CL. 5 This prediction can be illuminated by an intuitive explanation provided by Tussing and Greene (2001), who applied Weber's law (Weber, 1846(Weber, /1948 to account for the CL effect they obtained in a forced-choice recognition test between a target and a lure from the same semantic category.…”

Testing the Intramedia Interaction Hypothesis: The Contingent Effects of News

“…Although content redundancy across sources could produce additive effects, it is more likely to produce diminishing returns. Repeated exposure to information should increase learning of this information (e.g., Reed & Riach, 1960; Tussing & Greene, 2001). If an individual sees a story on the evening news and then reads about it in the next morning's newspaper (assuming that the two information sources provide consistent factual information), this should increase recall of the information above and beyond the original exposure.…”