Several suggestions for a class of theories of recognition memory have been proposed during the past decade. These models address predictions about judgments of prior occurrence of an event, not the identification of what it is, The history and current status of one of these models is discussed. The model postulates the detection of familiarity and the utilization of retrieval mechanisms as additive and separate processes. The phenomenal experience of familiarity is assigned to intraevent organizational integrative processes; retrieval depends on interevent elaborative processes. Other current theoretical options are described, and relevant supportive data from the literature are reviewed. New tests of the model involving both free recall and word pair paradigms are presented. The dual process model is extended to the word frequency effect and to the recognition difficulties of amnesic patients. In general English usage the verb to recognize usually is denned as the act of perceiving something as previously known. It is an apparently clear as well as etymologically correct usage, that is, to know again. In this article the process of recognizing will be analyzed, but it will be restricted to the recognition of the prior occurrence of an event. This restriction follows psychological rather than common usage. Experimentation that addresses problems of recognition has typically required subjects to make judg. nents about prior encounters with some tar

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Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence.

Although the majority of research on human memory has concentrated on a person's ability to recall or recognize items as having been presented in a particular situation, the effects of memory are also revealed in a person's performance of a perceptual task. Prior experience with material can make that material more easily identified or comprehended in perceptually difficult situations. Unlike with standard retention tests, effects of prior experience on a perceptual task do not logically require that a person be aware that he or she is remembering. Indeed, amnesic patients purportedly show effects of practice in their subsequent performance of a perceptual or motor task even though they profess that they do not remember having engaged in that prior experience. The experiments that are reported were designed to explore the relationship between the more aware autobiographical form of memory that is measured by a recognition memory test and the less aware form of memory that is expressed in perceptual learning. Comparisons of effects on perceptual learning and recognition memory reveal two classes of variables. Variables such as the level of processing of words during study influenced recognition memory, although they had no effect on subsequent perceptual recognition. A study presentation of a word had as large an effect on its later perceptual recognition when recognition memory performance was very poor as it did when recognition memory performance was near perfect. In contrast, variables such as the number and the spacing of repetitions produced parallel effects on perceptual recognition and recognition memory. Following Mandler and others, it is suggested that there are two bases for recognition memory. If an item is readily perceived so that it seems to "jump out" from the page, a person is likely to judge that he or she has previously seen the item in the experimental situation. Variables that influence ease of perceptual recognition, then, can also have an effect on recognition memory, so parallel effects are found. The second basis for recognition memory involves elaboration of a word's study context and depends on such factors as level of processing during study--factors that are not important for perceptual recognition of isolated words. Comparisons of perceptual recognition and recognition memory are shown to be useful for determining how a variable has its effect. Effects of study on perceptual recognition appear to be totally due to memory for physical or graphemic information. Results reported are also relevant to theories of perceptual learning. A single presentation of an item is shown to have large and long-lasting effects on its later perceptual recognition. At least partially, effects of study on perceptual recognition depend on the same variables as do effects on more standard memory tests.

On the relationship between autobiographical memory and perceptual learning.

In a first experiment, subjects verbalizing the stream of consciousness for a 5-min period were asked to try not to think of a white bear, but to ring a bell in case they did. As indicated both by mentions and by bell rings, they were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. On being asked after this suppression task to think about the white bear for a 5-min period, these subjects showed significantly more tokens of thought about the bear than did subjects who were asked to think about a white bear from the outset. These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against. A second experiment replicated these findings and showed that subjects given a specific thought to use as a distracter during suppression were less likely to exhibit later preoccupation with the thought to be suppressed.

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Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression

Five experiments are reported comparing memory for words that were generated by the subjects themselves with the same words when they were simply presented to be read. In all cases, performance in the generate condition was superior to that in the read condition. This held for measures of cued and uncued recognition, free and cued recall, and confidence ratings. The phenomenon persisted across variations in encoding rules, timed or selfpaced presentation, presence or absence of test information, and between- or within-subjects designs. The effect was specific to the response items under recognition testing but not under cued recall. A number of potential explanatory principles are considered, and their difficulties enumerated. It is concluded that the generation effect is real and that it poses an interesting interpretative problem. This is an empirically oriented article whose purpose is to report a set of simple experiments that establish the existence of a robust and interesting phenomenon of memory. This phenomenon, called the generation effect, is robust in that it manifests itself across a variety of testing procedures, encoding rules, and other situational changes. It is interesting in that it does not seem to be easily or satisfactoril y accommodated by any of the currently familiar explanatory notions. We expect that once the phenomenon is described in its initial form, it will be the subject of wider experimental analysis and will eventually become better understood. In contrast to the usual objective reasons for embarking upon a line of research, the present work was neither initiated by any extant theoretical issue nor inspired by any previously published findings. It was carried out with the sole purpose of arriving at a

The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon

In this article the author proposes an episodic theory of spoken word representation, perception, and production. By most theories, idiosyncratic aspects of speech (voice details, ambient noise, etc.) are considered noise and are filtered in perception. However, episodic theories suggest that perceptual details are stored in memory and are integral to later perception. In this research the author tested an episodic model (MINERVA 2; D. L. Hintzman, 1986) against speech production data from a word-shadowing task. The model predicted the shadowing-response-time patterns, and it correctly predicted a tendency for shadowers to spontaneously imitate the acoustic patterns of words and nonwords. It also correctly predicted imitation strength as a function of "abstract" stimulus properties, such as word frequency. Taken together, the data and theory suggest that detailed episodes constitute the basic substrate of the mental lexicon. Early in the 20th century, Semon (1909/1923) described a memory theory that anticipated many aspects of contemporary theories (Schacter, Eich, & Tulving, 1978). In modem parlance, this was an episodic (or exemplar) theory, which assumes that every experience, such as perceiving a spoken word, leaves a unique memory trace. On presentation of a new word, all stored traces are activated, each according to its similarity to the stimulus. The most activated traces connect the new word to stored knowledge, the essence of recognition. The multiple-trace assumption allowed Semon's theory to explain the apparent permanence of specific memories; the challenge was also to create

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Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access.

Certain reliable findings from research on directed forgetting seem difficult to accommodate in terms of the theoretical processes, such as selective rehearsal or storage differentiation, that have been put forward to account for directed-forgetting phenomena. Some kind of "missing mechanism" appears to be involved. In order to circumvent the methodological constraints that have limited the conclusions investigators could draw from past experiments, a new paradigm is introduced herein that includes a mixture of intentional and incidental learning. With this paradigm, a midlist instruction to forget the first half of a list was found to reduce later recall of the items learned incidentally as well as those learned intentionally. This result suggests that a cue to forget can lead to a disruption of retrieval processes as well as to the alteration of encoding processes postulated in prior theories. The results also provide a link between intentional forgetting and the literature on posthypnotic amnesia, in which disrupted retrieval has been implicated. With each of these procedures, the information that can be remembered is typically recalled out of order and often with limited recollection for when the information had been presented. It therefore was concluded here that retrieval inhibition plays a significant role in nonhypnotic as well as in hypnotic instances of directed forgetting. The usefulness of retrieval inhibition as a mechanism for memory updating was also discussed.

Disrupted Retrieval in Directed Forgetting: A Link With Posthypnotic Amnesia

Primary versus Secondary Rehearsal in Imagined Voices: Differential Effects on Recognition

Subjects were introduced to one male and one female voice by a tape recording with instructions to attend to characteristics of the voices. Then 18 pairs of words were presented visually on slides. The subject’s task during each 10-sec interslide interval was to repeat silently the pair of words over and over again in the male voice, in the female voice, or in the subject’s own voice. A surprise recognition test for the words indicated that the words were more likely to be recognized if they were spoken in the same Voice at test as was used to repeat them during presentation. Recognition of the words repeated in the subject’s own voice was not affected by the sex of the speaker at test. In Experiment 2, different speakers were used at test than those used by the subjects to repeat the words. The interaction between the sex of voice used at encoding and at test was again significant, but recognition was generally lower than in Experiment 1. It was concluded that it is not necessary to assume that subjects have literal copies of spoken words in memory but speaker’s voice does form an integral part of the verbal memory code and its influence is specific to a given speaker as well as to a given class of speakers (male or female).

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Effects of imagining speakers' voices on the retention of words presented visually.

Geiselman and Bellezza (1976) concluded that any retention in memory of the sex of a speaker of verbal material is automatic. Two possible reasons for this were hypothesized: the voice-connotation hypothesis and the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis. In Experiment 1, the to-be-remembered sentences contained either male or female agents. Incidental retention of sex of speaker did not occur. This result does not support the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis, which indicates that retention of voice should be independent of sentence content. In Experiment 2, the sentences contained neutral agents and incidental retention of sex of speaker did occur. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the connotation hypothesis. The different results with regard to incidental retention of speakers’s voice found in Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 using a within-subjects design. Experimemt 4 was conducted to determine if a speaker’s voice does, in fact, influence the meaning of a neutral sentence. In agreement with the voice-connotation hypothesis, sentences spoken by a male were rated as having more “potent” connotations than sentences spoken by a female.

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Incidental retention of speaker's voice.

One hundred and twenty-eight subjects tried to recall 20 simple sentences that for some subjects were presented in two different voices or were presented from two loudspeakers on different sides of the room. In addition, some subjects were instructed to remember not only the sentences, but also their voice and location attributes. Intentional instructions for location resulted in poorer recall of the sentences, but intentional instructions for voice did not. The voice attribute seemed to be automatically coded under both intentional and incidental instructions for remembering the attribute, whereas the location attribute seemed to require cognitive processing in addition to that required for encoding the meaning of the sentence. A test for clustering by voice in recall was done to determine if the evidence for automatic ceding of voice was merely an artifact resulting from better recall because of organization. However, no clustering was found. The ideas that speaker’s voice and sentence meaning were processed in parallel by different hemispheres of the brain and that the connotation of the voice influenced the meaning of each sentence were offered as two possible explanations of the results.

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Ralph E. Geiselman

Papers

Disrupted Retrieval in Directed Forgetting: A Link With Posthypnotic Amnesia

Primary versus Secondary Rehearsal in Imagined Voices: Differential Effects on Recognition

Effects of imagining speakers' voices on the retention of words presented visually.

Incidental retention of speaker's voice.

Long-term memory for speaker's voice and source location.