Is there a special association between self judgements and conscious recollection?

• Published in: Applied cognitive psychology 1999-02, Vol.13 (1), p.29-42
• Main Authors: Hirshman, Elliot, Lanning, Kristi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Consciousness; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Learning. Memory; Memory; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recall; Relationship; Selfassessment
• ISSN: 0888-4080; 1099-0720
• DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199902)13:1<29::AID-ACP541>3.0.CO;2-0

Dual‐process models of recognition memory posit a rapid retrieval process that produces a general sense of familiarity and a slower retrieval process that produces conscious recollections of prior experience. The Remember–Know paradigm has been used to study the subjective correlates of these two processes with Remember judgements assumed to index conscious recollection and Know judgements assumed to index familiarity. In this paper we examine Conway and Dewhurst's recent finding that judgements of self during encoding produce more Remember responses than alternative semantic judgements. While one might interpret this result to suggest a special association between self judgement and conscious recollection, we consider the possibility that it occurs because of greater discriminability in this condition. The results of four experiments demonstrate that a self judgement condition produces more, fewer, or an equal number of Remember responses relative to a control condition depending on whether overall discriminability in the self judgement condition is greater than, less than, or equal to that in the control condition. The implications of these results for conceptions of self judgement and the use of the Remember–Know paradigm are detailed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.