Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence.

Abstract

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-Portions of this article were presented as a presidential address to the Division of Experimental Psychology, at the meeting of the American Psychological Association in New York, September 1979.The general argument and some of the data presented here were discussed briefly at the November 1978 meeting of the Psychonomic Society in San Antonio, Texas (Mandler, 1978).Preparation of this paper and the research reported herein were supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 79-15336.I am grateful to David Rumelhart for substantive suggestions and methodological advice, and to Jan Rabinowitz and Lawrence Barsalou for helping make the model a reality.

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