Dual-process theories suggest that recognition memory is determined by two separate processes: familiarity and recollection. Experiment 1 behaviorally replicated past studies using the remember/know procedure to indicate that the amount of attention devoted to study influences both recollection and familiarity, but recollection more strongly. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the effects of attentio...

The hippocampal formation is needed to encode episodic memories, which may be consciously recalled at some future time. This review examines recent advances in understanding recollection in the context of spatiotemporally organized relational memory coding and discusses predictions and challenges for future research on conscious remembering.

The time it takes for a human participant to decide whether a given stimulus is an element of a remembered set increases approximately linearly with the number of elements in the set. Here we tested for and detected a spatial pattern of brain activity whose magnitude of expression during this memory search process correlates with set size. We then tested the idea that memory search simply invol...

A current focus in the prospective memory literature is the extent to which a prospective memory task (remembering to perform a future action) interferes with ongoing activities (defined in this study as lexical decision latencies). In the present study, participants had to detect one, two, three, four, five, or six prospective memory cues. Results showed no significant increase in lexical deci...

Neural correlates of explicit and implicit memory tend to co-occur and are therefore difficult to measure independently, posing problems for understanding the unique nature of different types of memory processing. To circumvent this problem, we developed an experimental design wherein subjects acquired information from words presented in a subliminal manner, such that conscious remembering was ...

Older adults are more likely than younger adults to confuse real and imagined events in episodic memory. This deficit may be attributed to a reduction in the specific features available for recollection (i.e., retrieval success) or to a deficit in the search and decision processes operating during recollection attempts (i.e., retrieval monitoring). The present experiments used a two-phase event...

Cortisol is known to affect memory processes. On the one hand, stress-induced or pharmacologically induced elevations of cortisol levels enhance memory consolidation. On the other hand, such experimentally induced elevations of cortisol levels have been shown to impair memory retrieval. However, the effects of individual differences in basal cortisol levels on memory processes remain largely un...

We ask the question: Which aspects of immediate memory performance improve with age? In two studies, we reexamine the widely held view that primary memory capacity estimates derived from children's immediate free recall are age invariant. This was done by assessing children's immediate free-recall accuracy while also measuring the order in which they elected to recall items (Experiment 1) and b...

In the legal system, inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts are often used to discredit witnesses' credibility. This is at odds with research findings showing that witnesses frequently report reminiscent details (details previously unrecalled) at an accuracy rate that is nearly as high as for consistently recalled information. The present study sought to put the validity of beliefs about recall...