MEMORY FOR NONOCCURRENCES - METACOGNITIVE AND PRESUPPOSITIONAL STRATEGIES

The present paper explores how people decide that an event has not occ urred. We assume that two inferential strategies may underly such a de cision. First, a ''metacognitive strategy'' can be used if a distracto r item is judged as memorable, but elicits no clear recollection. Unde r these two conditions, this strategy leads to a confident rejection. However, if the distractor item is not judged as particularly memorabl e, alternative inferential strategies will be used, and with less conf idence. These predictions were supported by two studies in which the m emorability of words was varied by their salience and in which a ''pre suppositional strategy'' was offered that allowed subjects to infer th e occurrence of an event from the use of the definite article containe d in queries. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.