TWO-PROCESS RECOGNITION MEMORY: INHIBITION & ROC CURVES

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Prior research suggests that at least two processes are involved in recognition judgments: A fast similarity-based process and a slower recall-like process. However, very little research has explored the specific operation of the recall process. Many researchers have proposed that the recall process operates in a recall-to-reject fashion. In a recall-to-reject process, a test foil that is similar to a studied stimulus is rejected (i.e., called "new") because the studied stimulus is recalled and the mismatch with the similar foil is noticed. For a variety of associative recognition tasks, such as recognizing whether two words were studied together or whether a test word was studied on a particular stimulus list, there is evidence for the use of such a recall-to-reject process. However, item recognition tasks have found no support for the use of recall-to-reject processing. Instead, the data from item recognition tasks are consistent with a recall-to-accept process in which a memory trace that matches the test probe must be retrieved in order for a positive ("old") response to be generated. The proposed research will provide more direct evidence on the operation of the recall-based process in item and associative recognition. New research will: 1) seek converging and unique evidence on the nature of the recall process using receiver- operating characteristic (ROC) curves, 2) estimate the contribution of the underlying processing using conjoint recognition theory, and 3) demonstrate a consequence of the recall process, namely, the inhibition of studied items that are similar to a studied test item. Two pilot studies provide evidence for this inhibitory phenomenon in a recognition task, and the proposed inhibition experiments will a) evaluate the development of that inhibition over processing time; b) determine the extent of the inhibition as a function of the similarity and number of studied items; and c) explore the relationship between the presence or absence of inhibition and the specific operation of the recall process (i.e., recall-to-reject or recall-to- accept).