An Annotated Reading List for Recognition Memory
This is a briefly annotated list of readings on the topic of recognition memory. It
is primarily designed for my students, but it should also be useful to others who
want a primer on the topic. By now there are a large number of articles and
chapters published on the topic and this reading list will perhaps provide you
with a nonrandom entry into this fascinating literature.
Old School
Recognition is the discrimination of events that one experienced from events that
one has not experienced. There are three basic varieties of recognition tasks.
One might be presented a stimulus, for instance, and be asked if it was
encountered in specific context. This is referred to as a yes-no or old-new task. A
closely related task is a rating task, whereby subjects are asked to provide a
scalar judgment that represents his or confidence that a stimulus was studied.
Some of these scalar values are usually associated with yes response and the
remaining associated with no response, and each represents a different degree of
confidence that the stimulus was studied. These can be related to a true-false
test, in that the subject is asked to judge whether it is true or false an item
occurred or how confident the subject is that an item occurred. A different form
of test is a multiple choice test. Accordingly, one might be shown two stimuli and
asked which one was presented in a specific context. Psychologists referred to
this as a two-alternative forced-choice task.
Recognition accuracy for yes-no and ratings tasks is a function of the probability
of responding yes to previously encountered items versus the probability of
responding yes to item not previously encountered. In the later case, recognition
accuracy is simply probability of choosing the correct alternative.
At first glance, these might seem to be rather mundane tasks. But when one
appreciates the variety of different forms of recognition memory tasks and the
fact that a given stimulus might have been encountered in thousands of different
prior contexts, recognition memory is a remarkable faculty indeed. Not
surprisingly, the nature of memory for prior occurrences has been investigated
for many years. Some of the earliest published papers on recognition memory
are:

Achilles, E. M. (1920). Experimental studies in recall and recognition.
Archives of Psychology, 27, 1-80.

Muller, G. E. (1913). Zur Analyse der Ged~ichtnist/itigkeitund des
Vorstellungsverlaufes. III. Teil. Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie,
Erganzungsband, 8.

Strong, E. K., Jr. (1912). The effect of time-interval upon recognition
memory. Psychological Review, 20, 339-372.
The Relevance of Recognition Memory Research
The earliest days of human memory research, however, paid little attention to
recognition, as the dominate research paradigm utilized recall tasks to assess
memory for past events. The investigation of recognition memory increased in
popularity in the late 1960’s, towards the end of the “verbal learning” heyday and
towards the beginning of the “cognitive revolution” in psychology. Today,
investigations of recognition memory are commonly reported in the literature,
and the empirical results that they report have proven to place strong constraints
on theories of memory.
One of the reasons for the relatively recent uptake in interest in recognition
memory is that recognition was viewed as a simpler task than, say, serial recall,
pair-associate recall, or free recall, which were the primary tasks that had
theoretical importance for the verbal learning researchers. That is, researchers
following a reductionist approach believed that more specific questions about the
nature of memory could be answered by focusing on what they believed was a
simpler task. Today, the massive popularity of recognition investigations is in no
small part attributable to the fact that the recognition task in its variety of forms
is amenable to the methodologies used to relate brain activity to behavior.
Investigating the neurological basis of recall performance is much more difficult
utilizing fMRI, PET, or EEG methods. Here are references for several recent
reviews of the literature on recognition memory:

Clark, S.E. & Gronlund, S.D. (1996). Global matching models of
recognition memory: How the models match the data. Psychonomic
Bulletin and Review, 3, 37-60.

Wixted, J. T. (2004). The psychology and neuroscience of forgetting.
Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 235-269.

Yonelinas, A.P. (2002). The nature of recollection and familiarity: A
review of 30 years of research. Journal of Memory and Language, 46,
441-517.
Recognition memory occupies a prominent place in the current zeitgeist of
memory research. However, the relevance of many early recognition memory
findings to then extant theoretical issues was called into question when it was
rather quickly discovered that recognition and recall were affected in different
ways by variety of factors. These interactions between operational factors and
memory tasks have subsequently been a primary source of motivation for many
who seek a better understanding of episodic memory. Here is but a short list of
articles that address the distinction between recognition and recall.
Emotion

Hamann, S. Cognitive and neural mechanisms of emotional memory.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2001; 5: 394-400.

Hertel, P. T., & Parks, C. (2002). Emotional episodes facilitate word recall.
Cognition and Emotion, 16, 685-694.

Windmann, S. & Kutas, M. (2001). Electrophysiological correlates of
emotion-induced recognition bias. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,
13(5), 577-592.
Context variability

Cook, G. I., Marsh, R. L., & Hicks, J. L.(2006). The role of recollection and
familiarity in the context variability mirror effect. Memory & Cognition,
34, 240-250.

Hicks, J. L., Marsh, R. L., & Cook, G. I. (2005). An observation on the role
of context variability in free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 1160-1164.

Steyvers, M. & Malmberg, K. J. (2003). The effect of normative context
variability on recognition memory, Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29(5), 760-766.
Word-frequency

Balota, D. A., & Neely, J. H. (1980). Text expectancy and word-frequency
effects in recall and recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Learning and Memory, 6, 576-587.

Deese, J. (1960). Frequency of usage and number of words in free recall:
The role of association. Psychological Review, 7, 337-344.

Gorman, A. M. (1961). Recognition memory for nouns as a function of
abstractness and frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 2329.

Gregg, V. H. (1976). Word frequency, recognition, and recall. In J. Brown
(ed.), Recall and recognition. London: Wiley.

Schulman, A. I. (1967). Word length and rarity in recognition memory.
Psychonomic Science, 9, 211-212.

Shepard, R. N. (1967). Recognition memory for words, sentences, and
pictures. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 6, 156-163.
Mnemonic Organization

Mandler, G. (1967). Organization in memory. In K. W. Spence and J. A.
Spence (Eds.) The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 1, New
York, Academic Press.

Mandler, G. Pearlstone, Z., & Koopmans, H. S. (1969). Effects of
organization and semantic similarity on recall and recognition.
Aging

Balota, D. A., Dolan, P. O., & Duchek, J. M. (2000). Memory Changes in
Healthy Older Adults. In Tulving, E. and Craik, F.I.M. (Eds.) The Oxford
Handbook of Memory. (395-409) NY: Oxford.

Craik, F. I. M. & McDowd, J. M. (1987). Age differences in recall and
recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,
and Cognition, 13, 474-479.

Light, L. L. (1991). Memory and aging: Four hypotheses in search of data.
Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 333-376.
Serial Position

Murdock, B. B. & Anderson, R. E. (1975). Encoding, storage, and retrieval
of item information. In R. L. Solso (Ed.) Information processing and
cognition: The Loyola Symposium. Earlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ.
Amnesia

Holdstock, J. S., Mayes, A. R., Roberts, N., Cezayirli, E., Isaac, C. L.,
O'Reilly, R. C., & Norman, K. A. (2002). Under what conditions is
recognition spared relative to recall after selective hippocampal damage in
humans? Hippocampus, 12, 341-351.
Recognition as Detection of an Internal Signal Embedded in Noise
These articles provide a rich empirical basis for evaluating theories of memory.
During the early years of recognition memory research, several researchers
developed models that were based on signal detection theory (Green & Swets,
1966; Macmillan & Creelman, 1991). Whereas recall was conceived as a
threshold-like process, recognition was assumed to be based on continuous
random variable, which was often conceptualized as the strength or familiarity of
the test stimulus. These papers are representative of this discussion in the early
literature on recognition memory.

Banks, W. P. (1970). Signal Detection theory and human memory.
Psychological Bulletin, 74, 81-99.

Bernbach, H. A. (1970) Decision process in memory. Psychological
Review, 74, 462-480.

Kintsch, W. (1967). Memory and decision aspects of recognition learning.
Psychological Review, 74, 496-504.

Lockhart, R. S. and Murdock, B. B., (1970). Memory and theory of signal
detection, Psychological Review, 74, 100-109.
Global-Matching Models
Signal-detection models made at least two significant contributions to our
understanding of recognition memory. The first is an empirical contribution:
Signal detection provided a means for independently measuring the sensitivity
and the bias of recognition memory performance. Signal detection also provided
a framework that considered the basis of a detection task to be evidence that
varied along a continuous dimension (e.g., familiarity). Hence, a comprehensive
understanding of recognition requires a way describing how the familiarity
associated with a stimulus is generated. Signal detection models are not, alas,
models of familiarity.
A highly influential class of familiarity models is global-matching models. There
are a wide variety of global-matching models. However, they have several
common elements. Global-matching models assume that a memory trace is
stored for each stimulus studied. These traces may be either holistic or
multidimensional representations of the stimulus and the context in which it
occurred. At test, global memory models assume that a temporary representation
of the test stimulus is constructed. This is referred to as a retrieval cue. The
retrieval cue is used to probe memory. The probe consists of a comparison of the
retrieval cue to contents of memory, which is assumed to consistent of at least
those traces stored during study, and perhaps many more. The interaction
between the retrieval cue and memory produces a scalar value, which represents
how familiar the retrieval cue seems to be. This value is then compared to a
subjectively set criterion. If the familiarity value exceeds the criterion, the
recognition response is “yes”; otherwise it is “no”. Generally speaking, the more
similar a retrieval cue is to the contents of memory the greater its familiarity
value will be.
Here are references for several first-generation global-matching models:

Estes, W. K. (1994). Classification and Cognition. New York: Oxford.

Gillund, G. & Shiffrin, R. M. (1984). A retrieval model for both recognition
and recall. Psychological Review, 91, 1-67.

Hintzman, D. L. (1988). Judgments of frequency and recognition memory
in a multiple-trace model. Psychological Review, 95, 528–551.

Humphreys, M. S., M. Bain, J. D., & Pike, R. (1989). Different way to cue a
coherent memory system: A theory of episodic, semantic, and procedural
tasks. Psychological Review, 96, 208-233.

Metcalfe, J. (1993). Novelty monitoring, metacognition, and control in a
composite holograph associative recall model: Implication for Korsakoff
Amnesia. Psychological Review, 100(1), 3-22.

Murdock, B. B. (1993). TODAM2: A model for the storage and retrieval of
item, associative, and serial-order information. Psychological Review,
100(2), 183-203.
The Effect of Interference in a Global-Matching Framework
A watershed moment in our understanding of recognition memory occurred in
the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when researchers noticed that the global-memory
models predicted that recognition memory for a given item would be negatively
affected to a greater degree when it was studied with other more strongly
encoded items than when studied with other more weakly encoded items. This
prediction was investigated using a mixed-list pure-list paradigm, whereby
subjects studied lists comprised of all strong or all weak items and the
performance on these lists was compared to the performance for similar items
studied on lists comprised both strong and weak items. This is now referred to as
list-strength manipulation, and list strength is another manipulation that has
different effects on recognition and recall. Whereas many global memory models
predicted that strong items would produce stronger interference than weak items
for both recognition and free recall, this prediction was only confirmed for free
recall.
Here are several critical articles on the list-strength effect:

Murdock, B. B., & Kahana, M. J. (1993a). Analysis of the list-strength
effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 19, 689-697.

Murdock, B. B., & Kahana, M. J. (1993b). List-strength and list-length
effects: Reply to Shiffrin, Ratcliff, Murnane, and Nobel (1993). Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 14501453.

Murnane, K., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1991a). Interference and the
representation of events in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning,Memory, and Cognition, 17, 855–874.

Murnane, K., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1991b). Word repetitions in sentence
recognition. Memory & Cognition, 19, 119–130.

Ratcliff, R., Clark, S. E., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1990). List-strength effect: I.
Data and discussion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 16, 163–178.

Shiffrin, R. M., Ratcliff, R., Murnane, K., & Nobel, P. (1993). TODAM and
the list-strength and list-length effects: Comment on Murdock and Kahana
(1993a). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 19, 1445-1449.

Tulving, E., & Hastie, R. (1972). Inhibition effects in intralist repetitions in
free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 92, 297–304.

Wixted, J. T., Ghadisha, H., & Vera, R. (1997). Recall latency following
pure- and mixed-strength lists: A direct test of the relative strength model
of free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,
and Cognition, 23, 523–538.
Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Analyses
The basis for the predicted list-strength effect for recognition memory is
the assumption that increasing how well item is encoded results in an increase in
the variability of it familiarity when memory is probed with a new item or foil.
Many separate-trace global-matching models made this assumption, and
therefore they predicted that the slope of the z-transformed receiver operating
(zROC) characteristic would systematically affected by a list-strength
manipulation. Several important articles on the form of the recognition memory
ROC were pulished. They established that slope of recognition memory zROC is
less than unity, is affected by item strength, but not affected by list-strength. As a
package these findings were difficult for many global-matching models to handle,
and the importance of these ROC analyses to the future direction of recognition
memory research cannot by over estimated.

Heathcote, A. (2003). Item recognition memory and the receiver operating
characteristic. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,
& Cognition, 29, 1210-1230.

Ratcliff, R., & McKoon, G. (1991). Using ROC data and priming results to
test global memory models. In W. E. Hockley & S. Lewandowsky (Eds.),
Relating theory and data; Essays in honor of Bennet B. Murdock (pp.
279–296). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ratcliff, R., McKoon, G., & Tindall, M. (1994). Empirical generality of data
from recognition memory receiver-operating characteristic functions and
implications for the global memory models. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 20, 763-785.

Ratcliff, R., Sheu, C.-F., & Gronlund, S. D. (1992). Testing global memory
models using ROC curves. Psychological Review, 99, 518–535.
Mirror Effects
Bayesian Models of Recognition Memory
Dual-process Models of Recognition Memory
The Retrieval Dynamics of Recognition Memory
Recognition Memory as an Implicit Form of Memory
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Recognition Memory
Aging
Context-dependent Recognition
The Relationship between Recognition and Classification
The Relationship between Recognition and Lexical Decision
The Relationship between Recognition and Perceptual Identification
The Relationship Between Recognition and Source Memory
Recognition Memory versus Memory Scanning