THE RELATION BETWEEN FEELINGS OF KNOWING AND THE NUMBER OF NEIGHBORING CONCEPTS LINKED TO THE TEST CUE

We investigated whether feeling-of-knowing judgments are influenced by the number of different neighboring concepts linked to the test cue i n long-term memory as measured using association norms. The purpose wa s to evaluate contrasting predictions made by the partial-retrieval hy pothesis and the competition hypothesis. The partial-retrieval hypothe sis assumes the more neighboring concepts activated by the test cue, t he higher the feeling of knowing. In contrast, the competition hypothe sis assumes that feelings of knowing are sensitive to competition betw een neighboring concepts, and it predicts that the fewer neighboring c oncepts activated by the cue, the higher the feeling of knowing. The f indings were compatible with the competition hypothesis showing that b oth feeling-of-knowing and prediction-of-knowing ratings always were h igher, the fewer different concepts were linked to the test cue. We ob tained an identical pattern of results using different kinds of cues i ncluding taxonomic category names, ending sounds, and meaningfully rel ated associates. We consider different ways that these findings could be reconciled with the partial-retrieval hypothesis, and we also discu ss implications for other explanations of feeling-of-knowing effects.