ORCID

Abstract

Despite studying a list of items only minutes earlier, when reencountered in a recognition memory test, undergraduate participants often say with total confidence that they have not studied some of the items before. Such high confidence miss (HCM) responses have been taken as evidence of rapid and complete forgetting and of everyday amnesia (Roediger & Tekin, 2020). We investigated (a) if memory for HCMs is completely lost or whether a residual memory effect exists and (b) whether dominant decision models predict the effect. Participants studied faces (Experiments 1a, 2, and 3) or words (Experiment 1b), then completed a singleitem recognition memory task, followed by either (a) a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task, in which the studied and nonstudied alternatives on each trial were matched for their previous old/new decision and confidence rating (Experiments 1 and 2) or (b) a second single-item recognition task in which the targets and foils were HCMs and high confidence correct rejections, respectively (Experiment 3). In each experiment, participants reliably distinguished HCMs from high-confidence correct rejections. The unequal variance signal detection and dual-process signal detection models were fit to the single-item recognition data, and the parameter estimates were used to predict the memory effect for HCMs. The dual-process signal detection model predicted the residual memory effect (as did another popular model, the mixture signal detection theory model). However, the unequal variance signal detection model incorrectly predicted a negative, or no, effect, invalidating this model. The residual memory effect for HCMs demonstrates that everyday amnesia is not associated with complete memory loss and distinguishes between decision models.

DOI

10.1037/xge0001599

Publication Date

2024-04-25

Publication Title

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Volume

153

Issue

7

ISSN

0096-3445

Keywords

dual-process signal detection model, everyday amnesia, forgetting, recognition memory, unequal variance signal detection model

First Page

1790

Last Page

1815

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