Abstract:

People often find themselves in a situation something seems a bit familiar to them, yet they fail to recall the related experience that happened in their lives before.. One theoretical explanation for the feelings of familiarity is that they result from a weaker form of the same process that produces recognition that occurs in the presence of recall (single-process models, SPM). An alternative theoretical explanation is that the feelings of familiarity result from the familiarity-based recognition that operates independently to the recollection-based recognition (dual-process theories, DPT). In the laboratory, the primary method of assessing the independence of recollection and familiarity is to look for dissociations between the two. In this article, attempt is made to tease apart the studies of recognition without cued recall paradigm (RWCRP). The results indicate that familiarity is more sensitive to some special conceptual and global-feature perceptual processes than recollection, thus rejecting the claim of SPM in showing that recollection and familiarity are preferentially sensitive to conceptual and partial-feature perceptual manipulations, respectively. And the behavioral and neuropsychological dissociations between recollection and familiarity are also observed by RWCR studies, which provide some support for this claim of DPT in showing that recollection and familiarity are mutually independent. Finally, the future research is put forward as to that the underlying processing mechanism of familiarity could be studied and Chinese words could be examined using RWCR method due to the difference between English and Chinese.

Key words: déjà, vu, recognition without cued recall, familiarity, recognition memory, dual-process models of recognition