Source memory for unidentified stimuli.

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether participants have source memory for test stimuli that they cannot identify. Using a paradigm developed to investigate the phenomenon of recognition without identification (Peynircioglu, 1990), we found that even when participants could not identify a previously studied item, they nonetheless exhibited above-chance performance on a source discrimination task. Most surprising was that source accuracy for unidentified items was independent of old-new discrimination and not different from that of identified items. These results are interpreted as evidence that source memory is based on a continuous, as opposed to a threshold-like, process and suggest that recollection may, in some circumstances, contribute to the phenomenon of recognition without identification.

No source memory for unrecognized items when implicit feedback is avoided

“…Furthermore, even without cue-context binding, a semantically related but non-studied cue was shown to elicit correct source discrimination after failed target recall, as long as the cue could reinstate the encoding context (Ball, DeWitt, Knight, & Hicks 2014). A similar argument applies to a study by Kurilla and Westerman (2010) who used word-fragment completion followed by an old/new judgment and a source judgment after an OLD response. When participants failed to complete the fragment but correctly recognized the corresponding word, they were also able to specify the source with above-chance probability.…”

“…The critical point here is that source judgments were required for hits, false alarms, and misses-but not for correct rejections. Hence, the procedure provides implicit feedback on the true old-new status of an item (see also Kurilla &Westerman, 2010, Footnote 2, andKlauer &Kellen, 2010). When only some of the NEW responses are followed by the source question, participants learn that these items must be old and that their recognition response was incorrect.…”

Using Multidimensional Encoding and Retrieval Contexts to Enhance Our Understanding of Stochastic Dependence in Source Memory

“…This should be a focus for further research, although we realize it may be difficult to achieve experimentally. There are other pieces of evidence here and there that source memory for a given dimension can be accessed sometimes in the absence of item recall (Cook, Marsh, & Hicks, 2006), or when people do not have a sense of recognition in the presence of item information (Starns, Hicks, Martin, & Brown, 2008), or when people cannot perceptually identify the test item (e.g., Kurilla & Westerman, 2010). But these examples are only about item-context associations, rather than direct context-context associations.…”

A continuous dual-process model of remember/know judgments.

“…In this account, recollection is a continuous signal, as much evidence suggests is the case (e.g., Johnson, McDuff, Rugg, & Norman, 2009;Kurilla & Westerman, 2010;Mickes, Johnson, & Wixted, 2010;Mickes, Wais, & Wixted, 2009;Palmer, Brewer, McKinnon, & Weber, 2010;Ratcliff & Starns, 2009;Slotnick, 2010;Starns, Hicks, Brown, & Martin, 2008; but see Parks & Yonelinas, 2009, for evidence that recollection is a threshold process). A remember judgment is made if the participant is satisfied that enough recollection has occurred.…”