We argue that analyzing everyday memory failures in terms of the “unity of consciousness” can elucidate the bases of such failures. A perfect unity amongst one’s mental states is rare. In extreme cases the unity of consciousness can breakdown in dramatic fashion , but such breakdowns also occur in less dramatic ways that affect us in everyday life. For example, disruptions in the unity of consciousness can result in everyday memory failures, such as forgetting to put on a tie for (...) an important formal meeting. After providing some philosophical background into the notions of “unity of consciousness” and “functionalism,” we offer preliminary analyses of three examples of everyday memory failure. We then introduce and develop what we call the “unity model” of memory failure and show how it explains the examples. We also describe different ways that unity can break down which, in turn, can lead to memory failure and inappropriate behavior. We then show how slips of action and other kinds of cognitive failures differ from everyday memory failures. Finally, we examine alternative models arguing that the unity model is preferable, and then show how our model is consistent with some experimental results. (shrink)

Earlier research by the author brought about findings suggesting that people in a special way process words related to demands of a problem they previously solved, even when they do not consciously notice this relationship. The findings concerned interference in the task in which the words appeared, a shift in affective responses to them that depended on sex of the participants, and impaired memory of the words. The aim of this study was to replicate these effects and to find out (...) whether they are related to working memory span of the participants, taken as a measure of the individual’s ability to control attention. Participants in the experimental group solved a divergent problem, then performed an ostensibly unrelated speeded affective classification task concerning each of a series of nouns, and then performed an unexpected cued recall task for the nouns. Afterwards, a task measuring WM span was administered. In the control group there was no problem-solving phase. Response latencies for words immediately following problem-related words in the classification task were longer in the experimental than in the control group, but there was no relationship between this effect and WM span. Solving the problem, in interaction with sex of the participants and, independently, with their WM span, influenced affective responses to problem-related words. Recall of these words, however, was not impaired in the experimental group. (shrink)

In agreement with some of the ideas expressed by Perruchet & Vinter (P&V), we believe that some phenomena hitherto attributed to processing may in fact reflect a fundamental distinction between direct and reflexive forms of consciousness. This dichotomy, developed by the phenomenological tradition, is substantiated by examples coming from experimental psychology and lesion neuropsychology.

The process-dissociation procedure was developed to separate the controlled and automatic contributions of memory. It has spawned the development of a host of new measurement approaches and has been applied across a broad range of fields in the behavioral sciences, ranging from studies of memory and perception to neuroscience and social psychology. Although it has not been without its shortcomings or critics, its growing influence attests to its utility. In the present article, we briefly review the factors motivating its development, (...) describe some of the early applications of the general method, and review the literature examining its underlying assumptions and boundary conditions. We then highlight some of the specific issues that the methods have been applied to and discuss some of the more recent applications of the procedure, along with future directions. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses transcripts of some 270 explanations subjects provided subsequently for recognition memory decisions that had been associated with remember, know, or guess responses at the time the recognition decisions were made. Only transcripts for remember responses included reports of recollective experiences, which seemed mostly to reflect either effortful elaborative encoding or involuntary reminding at study, especially in relation to the self. Transcripts for know responses included claims of just knowing, and of feelings of familiarity. These transcripts (...) indicated that subjects were often quite confident of the accuracy of their decisions, compared with those for guess responses. Transcripts for decisions associated with guess responses also expressed feelings of familiarity but additionally revealed various strategies and inferences that did not directly reflect memory for studied items. The article concludes with a historical and theoretical overview of some interpretations of the states of awareness measured by these responses. (shrink)

Mangan's concept of fringe consciousness is too heavily based on informal introspection, and too all-embracing to constitute a coherent family. It lacks the tight operationalisation needed to identify individual examples of fringe consciousness, and to test Mangan's theoretical account against detailed findings from empirical research. I propose a more focused two-component operationalisation of the fringe. The first component addresses how we can operationalise the consciousness of the fringe; here I draw lessons from research in implicit cognition, and suggest implications for (...) the wider understanding of consciousness. The second component addresses the informational content of the fringe. (shrink)

In three experiments, picture quality between test items was manipulated to examine whether subjects’ expectations about the fluency normally associated with these different stimuli might influence the effects of fluency on preference or familiarity-based recognition responses. The results showed that fluency due to pre-exposure influenced responses less when objects were presented with high picture quality, suggesting that attributions of fluency to preference and familiarity are adjusted according to expectations about the different test pictures. However, this expectations influence depended on subjects’ (...) awareness of these different quality levels. Indeed, imperceptible differences seemed not to induce expectations about the test item fluency. In this context, fluency due to both picture quality and pre-exposure influenced direct responses. Conversely, obvious, and noticed, differences in test picture quality did no affect responses, suggesting that expectations moderated attributions of fluency only when fluency normally associated with these different stimuli was perceptible but difficult to assess. (shrink)

Processes comparable in important respects to those underlying human conscious and non-conscious processing can be identified in a range of species and it is argued that these reflect evolutionary precursors of the human processes. A distinction is drawn between two types of processing: stimulus-based and higher-order. For ‘higher-order,’ in humans the operations of processing are themselves associated with conscious awareness. Conscious awareness sets the context for stimulus-based processing and its end-point is accessible to conscious awareness. However, the mechanics of the (...) translation between stimulus and response proceeds without conscious control. The paper argues that higher-order processing is an evolutionary addition to stimulus-based processing. The model’s value is shown for gaining insight into a range of phenomena and their link with consciousness. These include brain damage, learning, memory, development, vision, emotion, motor control, reasoning, the voluntary versus involuntary debate, and mental disorder. (shrink)

This study investigated whether the encoding and retrieval of plurality information and letter-case information of words in recognition memory can be inhibited. Response-deadline experiments using single words have indicted a controlled processing mode, whereas studies using meaningful sentences have indicated an automatic mode of processing plurality information. Two similar opposing views have existed on the processing of letter-case information. The abstractionist view contends that we retain the abstract lexical information and discard the superficial perceptual case information. The proceduralist view holds (...) that perceptual details cannot be separated from the lexical information. Using an intentional and an attention-diverted learning procedure and instructions to ignore plurality and case, we found that subjects experienced a consistent interference effect of changed plurality from study to test but slightly less interference from changed case, suggesting strong automaticity for plurality, and comparatively less automaticity, for case processing. (shrink)

A modified Remember/Know paradigm was used to investigate reported subjective awareness during retrieval. Levels of processing was manipulated at study. Word pairs were presented during test trials, and participants were instructed to respond “remember” if they recollected one of the two words, “know” if the word was familiar in the absence of recollection, or “new” if they judged both words to be new. Participants were then required to indicate which of the 2 words was old . With the standard RK (...) proportions, deeper processing at study increased remember proportions and decreased know proportions, but this dissociation was not shown with the 2AFC proportion correct measure which instead demonstrated robust LOP effects for both remember and know trials, suggesting that the know proportion measure severely distorts the nature of LOP effects on familiarity. (shrink)

I argue that psychologists interested in human causal judgment should understand and adopt a representation of causal mechanisms by directed graphs that encode conditional independence (screening off) relations. I illustrate the benefits of that representation, now widely used in computer science and increasingly in statistics, by (i) showing that a dispute in psychology between ‘mechanist’ and ‘associationist’ psychological theories of causation rests on a false and confused dichotomy; (ii) showing that a recent, much-cited experiment, purporting to show that human subjects, (...) incorrectly let large causes ‘overshadow’ small causes, misrepresents the most likely, and warranted, causal explanation available to the subjects, in the light of which their responses were normative; (iii) showing how a recent psychological theory (due to P. Cheng) of human judgment of causal power can be considerably generalized: and (iv) suggesting a range of possible experiments comparing human and computer abilities to extract causal information from associations. (shrink)

Level of processing and generation effects were replicated in separate experiments in which recognition memory was tested using either short or long response deadlines. These effects were similar at each deadline. Moreover, at each deadline these effects were associated with subsequent reports of remembering, not of knowing. And reports of both knowing and remembering increased following the longer deadline. These results imply that knowing does not index an automatic familiarity process, as conceived in some dual-process models of recognition, and that (...) both remembering and knowing increase with the slower, more controlled processing permitted by the longer response time. (shrink)

Buchner, Erdfelder, and Vaterrodt-Plunnecke (1995) advocated an exposition of the process dissociation procedure within the framework of multinomial modeling. Among the misleading aspects of this exposition is its tendency to obscure the overlap between processes. In contrast, clarifying these crucial interactions leads to a general classification of response bias corrections to the process dissociation procedure. This scheme, in which corrective models are classified on the basis of process interactions, clarifies the assumptions underlying previously proposed corrections. As an illustration of the (...) framework, three such corrections are derived. These corrective models are evaluated by applying them to the data reported by Buchner et al. (1995). © 1996 Academic Press, Inc. (shrink)

This study was designed to investigate the effects of aging on consciousness in recognition memory, using the Remember/Know/Guess procedure . Remembering and Knowing. In E. Tulving & F. I. M. Craik , The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford University Press.). In recognition memory, older participants report fewer occasions on which recognition is accompanied by recollection of the original encoding context. Two main hypotheses were tested: the speed mediation hypothesis . The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review, (...) 3, 403–428) and the executive-aging hypothesis . An application of prefrontal cortex function theory to cognitive aging. Psychological Bulletin, 120, 272–292). A group of young and a group of older adults took a recognition test in which they classified their responses according to Gardiner, J. M., & Richarson-Klavehn, A. . Remembering and Knowing. In E. Tulving & F. I. M. Craik , The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford University Press. remember-know-guess paradigm. Subsequently, participants completed processing speed and executive function tests. The results showed that among the older participants, R responses decreased, but K responses did not. Moreover, a hierarchical regression analysis supported the view that the effect of age in recollection experience is determined by frontal lobe integrity and not by diminution of processing speed. (shrink)

The binary remember/know task requires participants to dichotomize their subjective recognition experiences into those with recollection and those only with familiarity. Many variables have produced dissociative effects on remember/know judgments. In contrast, having participants make independent recollection/familiarity ratings has consistently produced parallel effects, suggesting the dissociations may be artifacts of using binary judgments. Bodner and Lindsay reported a test-list context effect with binary judgments: Increased remembering but decreased knowing for a set of critical items tested with a set of less-memorable (...) items. Here we report a parallel effect of test-list context on recollection and familiarity ratings, induced by a shift in response bias. We argue that independent ratings are preferable to binary judgments because they allow participants to directly report the co-occurrence of recollection and familiarity for each item. Implications for the measurement of self-reported recognition experiences, and for accounts of recognition memory, are discussed. (shrink)

In three experiments, picture quality between test items was manipulated to examine whether subjects’ expectations about the fluency normally associated with these different stimuli might influence the effects of fluency on preference or familiarity-based recognition responses. The results showed that fluency due to pre-exposure influenced responses less when objects were presented with high picture quality, suggesting that attributions of fluency to preference and familiarity are adjusted according to expectations about the different test pictures. However, this expectations influence depended on subjects’ (...) awareness of these different quality levels. Indeed, imperceptible differences seemed not to induce expectations about the test item fluency. In this context, fluency due to both picture quality and pre-exposure influenced direct responses. Conversely, obvious, and noticed, differences in test picture quality did no affect responses, suggesting that expectations moderated attributions of fluency only when fluency normally associated with these different stimuli was perceptible but difficult to assess. (shrink)

Three experiments introduced a recognition memory paradigm designed to investigate reported subjective awareness during retrieval. At study, in Experiments 1A and 2, words were either generated or read , while modality of presentation was manipulated in Experiment 1B. Word pairs were presented during test trials, and participants indicated if they contained an old word by responding “remember”, “know” or “new” in Experiments 1A and 1B, and by responding “strong no”, “weak no”, “weak yes”, or “strong yes” in Experiment 2. Participants (...) were then required to decide which of the 2 words was old. We demonstrated that the proportion measures used in the Remember Know paradigm substantially underestimated the influence of generation on familiarity resulting in an artificial dissociation between indices of knowing and remembering . We also found a qualitatively different pattern of forced-choice recognition performance as a function of claimed awareness. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated response times for remember and know responses in recognition memory. RTs to remember responses were faster than RTs to know responses, regardless of whether the remember–know decision was preceded by an old/new decision or was made without a preceding old/new decision . The finding of faster RTs for R responses was also found when remember–know decisions were made retrospectively. These findings are inconsistent with dual-process models of recognition memory, which predict that recollection is slower and more effortful (...) than familiarity. Word frequency did not influence RTs, but remember responses were faster for words than for nonwords. We argue that the difference in RTs to remember and know responses reflects the time taken to make old/new decisions on the basis of the type of information activated at test. (shrink)

A framework to explain item-specific implicit and explicit memory is proposed. It explores the mutual implications of four kinds of processing mechanism that are familiar in the literature. The first kind of mechanisms are those related to memory representation which include the kind of storage processes that subserve the maintenance of different types of information in memory. It is argued that there is very little evidence to suggest that fact and event memory require the postulation of algorithmically distinct kinds of (...) storage mechanism. The second mechanism is the enhanced fluency of activation of representation triggered by the encoding of components of those representations that results from the storage changes mediating memory. It is argued that enhanced fluency underlies all item-specific implicit memory and that the same kind of fluency process is probably involved regardless of the type of memory representation fluently activated. The third type of mechanism is the kind of attribution process that is triggered by fluency and gives rise to aware memory feelings as well as specific perceptual and aesthetic feelings The final mechanism is active search, which is an often present feature of explicit memory, and involves the effortful mediation of the frontal lobes. How the interactions between these different mechanisms accounts for item-specific implicit memory, recognition and recall is discussed, as is the framework's relationship with other current views about the mechanisms underlying memory. The best available methods of measuring enhanced fluency, familiarity, and recollection are reviewed so as to indicate the ways in which the framework may be tested. (shrink)