RECOGNITION MEMORY ROCS FOR ITEM AND ASSOCIATIVE INFORMATION - THE CONTRIBUTION OF RECOLLECTION AND FAMILIARITY

Receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) were examined in three recog nition memory experiments. ROCs for item information (i.e., was this w ord presented?) were found to be curvilinear. However, ROCs for associ ative information (i.e., were these two words presented together?) wer e found to be linear. The results are in agreement with the prediction s of a dual-process model that assumes that recognition judgments are based on familiarity and recollection. Familiarity reflects the assess ment of a continuous strength dimension and is well described as a sig nal detection process, whereas recollection reflects the retrieval of qualitative information about the study episode and behaves like a dis crete threshold process. The results showed that memory judgments abou t items relied on a combination of recollection and familiarity, but t hat judgments about associations relied primarily on recollection. Fur ther examination of the associative ROCs suggested that subjects were able to recollect that old pairs of items were in the study list, and, under some conditions, that new pairs were not in the study list.