REPETITION OF PREVIOUSLY NOVEL MELODIES SOMETIMES INCREASES BOTH REMEMBER AND KNOW RESPONSES IN RECOGNITION MEMORY

Recognition memory for previously novel melodies was tested in three e xperiments in which subjects used remember and know responses to repor t experiences of recollection, or of familiarity in the absence of rec ollection for each melody they recognized. Some of the melodies were t aken from Polish folk songs and presented vocally but without the word s. Others were taken from obscure pieces of classical music, presented as single-line melodies. Prior to the test, the melodies were repeate d for varying numbers of study trials. Repetition of the Polish melodi es increased both remember and know responses, while repetition of cla ssical melodies increased remember but not know responses. When subjec ts were instructed to report guesses, guess responses were inversely r elated to remember and know responses and there were more guesses to l ures than to targets. These findings establish that remembering and kn owing are fully independent functionally and, by the same token, they provide further evidence against the idea that response exclusivity ca uses increases in remembering to force decreases in knowing. The findi ngs also suggest that simultaneous increases in remembering and knowin g occurred because the Polish melodies came from a genre for which the subjects had relatively little previous experience.