DISCRIMINATING ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF FALSE RECOGNITION - THE CASES OF WORD CONCRETENESS AND WORD-FREQUENCY

A classical finding in recognition memory is that participants falsely recognize new high-frequency words more than new low-frequency words. Similarly, participants falsely recognize new abstract words more tha n new concrete words. The authors contrast a memory-based explanation of these effects to a decision-based explanation. In the former explan ation, differences in false recognition arise because some sets of new items have properties that discriminate them from study-list items st ored in memory. In the latter explanation, differences in false recogn ition arise because some sets of old items are especially well remembe red. This strong memory influences decision processes, with resulting effects on false recognition of new items. The authors test these view s by examining the relationship between relative hit rates and relativ e false-alarm rates under a variety of encoding conditions. The result s of 7 experiments support the memory-based approach.