The role of noncriterial recollection in estimating recollection and familiarity

Abstract

Noncriterial recollection (ncR) is recollection of details that are irrelevant to task demands. It has been shown to elevate familiarity estimates and to be functionally equivalent to familiarity in the process dissociation procedure (Yonelinas & Jacoby, 1996). However, Toth and Parks (2006) found no ncR in older adults, and hypothesized that this absence was related to older adults' criterial recollection deficit. To test this hypothesis, as well as whether ncR is functionally equivalent to familiarity and increases the subjective experience of familiarity, remember-know and confidencerating methods were used to estimate recollection and familiarity with young adults, young adults in a divided-attention condition (Experiment 1), and older adults. Supporting Toth and Parks' hypothesis, ncR was found in all groups, but was consistently larger for groups with higher criterial recollection. Response distributions and receiver-operating characteristics revealed further similarities to criterial recollection and suggested that neither the experience nor usefulness of familiarity was enhanced by ncR. Overall, the results suggest that ncR does not differ fundamentally from criterial recollection.Keywords noncriterial recollection; recognition; recollection; familiarity; aging; remember-know; receiveroperating characteristic; partial recollection When trying to remember a specific detail about a prior event, people sometimes recollect other, often irrelevant, details. Memory for these irrelevant details has been dubbed "noncriterial recollection" (ncR); 'recollection' because the memory is of episodic details and 'noncriterial' because those details are not the criterial (or target) detail that one is trying to remember (Yonelinas & Jacoby, 1996). For instance, many students have had the unfortunate experience of reading a test question and realizing that they can remember the page in the book where they read the answer, perhaps even the exact location of that answer on the page (noncriterial details), but are unable to remember what that answer (the criterial detail) actually is. Thus, ncR can be viewed as the somewhat common (and irritating) experience of remembering information that is often useless for successfully completing the task at hand, such as answering a test question correctly.Please address correspondence to: Colleen M. Parks, Psychology Department, University of California, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616, Email: cmparks@ucdavis.edu, Phone: 530-754-9439, Fax: 530-752-2087. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscrip...

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“…It has been argued that non-criterial recollection does not lead to underestimates of recollection because it is functionally equivalent to familiarity in that it operates independently of recollection and similar to familiarity (Yonelinas & Jacoby, 1996). However, contrary to this view non-criterial recollection's effect on familiarity estimates was found to be proportional to recollection of the same details when they are directly tested, suggesting what is captured by at least a portion of the familiarity estimates is the contribution of recollection of details that are not relevant for the task (Parks, 2007). Non-criterial recollection was also found not to increase the subjective sense of familiarity, again pointing to it as a real recollective phenomenon under conditions in which recollection is operationally defined as recovery of a detail that is difficult to retrieve.…”

“…Because we tested remote memories that are richer in context than lists of items presented in the laboratory, the question of non-criterial recollection (Parks, 2007;Yonelinas & Jacoby, 1996) becomes more conspicuous, although not necessarily qualitatively different. Non-criterial recollection is recollection of details that are irrelevant to the memory task demands, for example when trying to remember what movie you saw last week, and all you can recall is where your car was parked.…”

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“…For example, in a test of object location, individuals may remember what they thought about when they studied the object, but may be unable to remember its location. This has been referred to as “noncriterial recollection” (Yonelinas and Jacoby, 1996; Parks, 2007), and it can bias estimates of recollection and familiarity, and can play havoc with imaging or patient studies that use very restrictive measures of source memory to assess recollection and familiarity (e.g., Wais et al, 2010). Thus, when using tests such as source memory to measure recollection and familiarity, it is important to use a task in which individuals are very likely to recollect the criterial information if they recollect any information about a particular item (for additional discussion of noncriterial recollection, see Yonelinas and Jacoby, 1996).…”

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