Expertise and recollective experience: recognition memory for familiar and unfamiliar academic subjects

Abstract

Two experiments investigated whether expertise effects in recognition memory could be found for different academic subjects. The roles of subjective experience and repetition on such effects were also explored. Experiment 1 showed that overall recognition memory was greater for familiar than for unfamiliar academic words (the expertise effect). Additionally, this effect was attributable to the subjective experience of remembering rather than knowing. Experiment 2 showed that repetition of stimulus items at study eliminated these expertise effects. Previous research has generally failed to find expertise effects in overall recognition memory. The present findings show that expertise effects do occur in overall recognition memory and are associated with the richer memorial experience of remembering rather than knowing.

Experts’ memory: an ERP study of perceptual expertise effects on encoding and recognition

“…Participants with higher levels of car expertise (i.e., car experts) recognized cars more accurately and "recollected" old cars more often than participants with lower levels of expertise (i.e., car novices), 2 as observed frequently in previous research (Brandt et al, 2005;Goldin, 1979;Kawamura et al, 2007;Long & Prat, 2002;Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008). Effect sizes of the expertise effects in our study were small to medium, replicating previously reported effect sizes in memory performance for experts and novices (Horry et al, 2010;Long & Prat, 2002;Marcon et al, 2009).…”

“…Only experts possess this ability as indicated by better subordinate categorization ability and lower false alarm rates. They are thus more likely not only to encode quantitatively more representations, but also to create qualitatively different -more distinct and detailed-representations that emphasize those features that facilitate within-category discrimination (Brandt et al, 2005;Goldstone, 1998). Our results confirm this assumption.…”

“…In contrast, recognition based on familiarity lacks the retrieval of episodic details and arises from identifying a global similarity between a seen item and information stored in memory. Expertise improved overall recognition memory of scholarly terms (Brandt, Cooper, & Dewhurst, 2005), of words associated with the NFL (Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008), and, in hiking experts, of photographs of mountain scenery (Kawamura, Suzuki, & Morikawa, 2007). Expertise also led to qualitative differences; it facilitated recollection, but not familiarity, for scholarly terms (Brandt, et al, 2005) and Star Trek (Long & Prat, 2002).…”

“…Expertise improved overall recognition memory of scholarly terms (Brandt, Cooper, & Dewhurst, 2005), of words associated with the NFL (Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008), and, in hiking experts, of photographs of mountain scenery (Kawamura, Suzuki, & Morikawa, 2007). Expertise also led to qualitative differences; it facilitated recollection, but not familiarity, for scholarly terms (Brandt, et al, 2005) and Star Trek (Long & Prat, 2002). These studies of expert memory assumed that recognition processes were improved by the richer and more elaborative encoding of the material that resulted from expertise-based inferences and associations between learned items and existing semantic knowledge.…”

“…Studies of expert memory have assumed that the facilitating effect of expertise on memory is caused by fine-tuned perceptual processes that closely interact with broad semantic and conceptual knowledge (e.g., Brandt et al, 2005;Kawamura et al, 2007;Long & Prat, 2002) and theories (Gobet & Simon, 1996;Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008). They suggested that encoding processes are accomplished in an automatically deeper, semantic fashion.…”