Remembering and knowing: exploring subjective report, familiarity, and confidence

This thesis examined how people make and understand judgments of subjective experience using the categories of Remember, Know, Familiar, and Guess (R, K, F, G), and represents the first attempt to use all four categories in a standard episodic recognition task. The key findings of this body of work are that Know and Familiar categories of subjective experience can be reliably differentiated, as can each of the four subjective experience categories from confidence. Chapter 2 examined lay understanding of subjective experience by asking participants to examine others’ memory justification statements. Participants reliably differentiated the four justification types (R, K, F, G) in terms of confidence (Experiment 2.1) and subjective experience (Experiments 2.2 and 2.3); manipulations of confidence influenced assignment of justifications to subjective experience categories for some types of justification more than others (Experiment 2.2); and participants were able to divide justification statements into Know and Familiar when no definitions of those concepts were provided (Experiment 2.4). Chapter 3 investigated the influence of experimentally imposed familiarity on subjective experience. Pre-exposure of target and lure items led to impaired recognition across all experiments, but differences in subjective experience were only observed when pre-exposure was performed between-subjects (Experiment 3.1 vs. 3.2 and 3.3). Participants were able to use recollection strategically to overcome the familiarity induced by pre-exposure. Chapter 4 compared source, confidence, and subjective experience judgments and demonstrated subjective experience judgments to be more sensitive to source accuracy than confidence judgments; confidence judgments were more lenient than subjective experience; and confidence judgments were more affected by source manipulations than were subjective experience judgments. Across the thesis, analysis of reaction time also demonstrated reliable differences between and within judgment types. This thesis found critical differences between Remember, Know, and Familiar. Know and Familiar judgments were shown to dissociate on recognition accuracy, source accuracy, confidence, and response time. In contrast, Remember and Know judgments were only shown to be differentiated by source accuracy. The findings have implications for methodological and theory development and are discussed in terms of single- and dual-process accounts of memory.