It is well-known that most citizens are unfamiliar with their member of Congress, but the import of this fact for democratic representation is largely unknown. Powerful theories suggest both that familiarity breeds contempt and that constituents like their member more the more they know about them. Much of the evidence that would settle this theoretical conflict is lacking, however, because the...

The retrieval processes supporting recognition memory for faces were investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs). The focus for analyses was ERP old/new effects, which are the differences between neural activities associated with correct judgments to old (studied) and new (unstudied) test stimuli. In two experiments it was possible to identify three old/new effects that behaved as neural...

BACKGROUND Accurate assessment of the difficulty of consumer health texts is a prerequisite for improving readability. General purpose readability formulas based primarily on word length are not well suited for the health domain, where short technical terms may be unfamiliar to consumers. To address this need, we previously developed a regression model for predicting "average familiarity" with ...

This study explored retention of idioms and novel (i.e. newly created or grammatically generated) expressions in English-speaking girls following exposure only once during a conversation. Our hypothesis was that idioms, because of their inherent holistic, nonliteral and social characteristics, are acquired differently and more rapidly than novel utterances. Two age groups of typically developin...

Although frequently used with recognition, a few studies have used the Remember/Know procedure with free recall. In each case, participants gave Know judgments to a significant number of recalled items (items that were presumably not remembered on the basis of familiarity). What do these Know judgments mean? We investigated this issue using a source memory/free-recall procedure. For each word t...

Evaluating the familiarity of faces is critical for social animals as it is the basis of individual recognition. In the present study, we examined how face familiarity is reflected in neural activities in our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Skin-surface event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured while a fully awake chimpanzee observed photographs of familiar and unfamiliar chi...

Recognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably efficient, effortless and robust. We asked if feature-based face processing facilitates detection of familiar faces by testing the effect of face inversion on a visual search task for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Because face inversion disrupts configural and holistic face processing, we hypothesized that inversion would diminish the fami...

A fundamental distinction in tasks of memory search is whether items receive varied mappings (targets and distractors switch roles across trials) or consistent mappings (targets and distractors never switch roles). The type of mapping often produces markedly different performance patterns, but formal memory-based models that account quantitatively for detailed aspects of the results have not ye...

It is generally accepted that associative recognition memory is supported by recollection. In addition, recent research indicates that familiarity can support associative memory, especially when two items are unitized into a single item. Both perceptual and conceptual manipulations can be used to unitize items, but few studies have compared these two methods of unitization directly. In the pres...