Familiarity and Recollections : Interactions with Larry Jacoby

2 We have both been profoundly influenced by the teaching, writing and ideas of Larry Jacoby, and so welcome this opportunity to record our gratitude to him, both for his theories and for his friendship and inspiration over the years. The present authors are contemplating Jacoby's work from different career vantage points; one (Rose) just setting out and the other (Craik) nearing the end of his professional career. But although our perspectives differ we also share a common approach to the study of memory, and use this platform to comment on Jacoby's ideas as they evolved from classical work on verbal learning and memory stores to current notions on the distinction between familiarity and recollection, and on into the future to speculate on the possible implications of Jacobean thought for cognitive neuroscience. The main focus of the chapter however, will be on the impact that Larry's work has had on the Craik lab across the years. Society in 1972. Larry was a faculty member at Iowa State University at that time, and the meeting was set up by his colleague, the late Wayne Bartz, himself a prominent figure in memory research and a very nice man. The point of the meeting was to discuss the possibility of Larry spending a year in Craik's lab, with Bartz remarking to Craik that " You will learn at least as much from Larry as he will from you! " This seemed like an intriguing possibility, and the young fresh-faced Larry seemed bright and enthusiastic, so the visit was arranged. In his chapter in a much later Festschrift for Craik (Jacoby, Marsh & Dolan, 2001) Larry remembered another detail of that first meeting. He had recently carried out experiments to show that mere repetition of words was not sufficient to increase subsequent recall from long-term memory; it was necessary to engage the meaning of the words rather than their acoustic properties for such 'transfer' to occur (Jacoby & Bartz, 1972; Jacoby & Goolkassian, 1973). These results were contrary to the predictions from the currently dominant dual-store models, and Larry was hopeful that they would make him famous, if not exactly overnight, in a month or two at most. So he was a little chagrined to learn that the Craik and Lockhart (1972) article was about to be published, and that this paper set out very much the same story but perhaps in a broader …