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.

Publication Date

2024-04-25

Publication Title

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Volume

153

Issue

7

ISSN

0096-3445

Acceptance Date

2024-03-18

Deposit Date

2024-09-03

Funding

David R. Shanks https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4600-6323 The findings were presented at the 2023 meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society, Plymouth, United Kingdom. We thank Henry Roediger III and Ian Dobbins for comments on an earlier version of the article. We also thank Acquina Akbar, Thomas Biggs, Esme Doe, William Drover-Taylor, Leyre Honrubia Arribas, Oliver Mortimer, Gayathri Parackaparambil Subramanian, Aaron Ponting, Charlie Richards, Andre Santa Barbara Escarigo, and Nethmi Vithana Weerasinghe Arachchilage for their contribution to data collection. This research was partially funded by the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council (Grants ES/S014616/1 and ES/Y002482/1) to David R. Shanks. The authors have no known conflicts of interest to disclose. The data, analysis scripts, and materials for all experiments are available at the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/2q5yw/.

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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