Recognition without awareness: An elusive phenomenon
- 1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA
- 2Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA
- 3Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA
- 4Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Center, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, USA
- 5Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, San Diego, California 92161, USA
Abstract
Two recent studies described conditions under which recognition memory performance appeared to be driven by nondeclarative memory. Specifically, participants successfully discriminated old images from highly similar new images even when no conscious memory for the images could be retrieved. Paradoxically, recognition performance was better when images were studied with divided attention than when images were studied with full attention. Furthermore, recognition performance was better when decisions were rated as guesses than when decisions were associated with low or high confidence. In three experiments, we adopted the paradigm used in the earlier studies in an attempt to repeat this intriguing work. Our attempts were unsuccessful. In all experiments, recognition was better when images were studied with full attention than when images were studied with divided attention. Recognition was also better when participants indicated high or low confidence in their decision than when they indicated that their decision was a guess. Thus, our results conformed to what typically has been reported in studies of recognition memory, and we were unable to demonstrate recognition without awareness. We encourage others to explore this paradigm, and to try to identify conditions under which the phenomenon might be demonstrated.
Footnotes
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↵6 Corresponding author.
E-mail lsquire{at}ucsd.edu; fax (858) 552-7457.
- Received March 22, 2010.
- Accepted May 25, 2010.
