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The use of remember-know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember-know and confidence (i.e., sure-probably) judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study (87%), but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments (72%). Instead, high-confidence judgments were more likely than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection (62%), but still included recollection from the study context (33%). Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details.

Executive functions and extraversion have been linked to similar neurological substrates. Participants were tested on a variety of tasks that assessed performance on three components of executive functioning (i.e., shifting, updating, and inhibition) and two measures of extraversion (Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised and Carver and White’s BIS/BAS scales). More extraverted participants showed different patterns of executive function performance than the more introverted participants. Extraverts performed best on more difficult tasks and on updating tasks. Conversely, introverts performed best on set shifting tasks. These results suggest that executive functioning strengths differ based on degree of extraversion.

The Wisconsin Card Sort Task (WCST) is a commonly used neuropsychological test of executive or frontal lobe functioning. Traditional behavioral measures from the task (e.g., perseverative errors) distinguish healthy controls from clinical populations, but such measures can be difficult to interpret. In an attempt to supplement traditional measures, we developed and tested a family of sequential learning models that allowed for estimation of processes at the individual subject level in the WCST. Testing the model with substance dependent individuals and healthy controls, the model parameters significantly predicted group membership even when controlling for traditional behavioral measures from the task. Substance dependence was associated with a) slower attention shifting following punished trials and b) reduced decision consistency. Results suggest that model parameters may offer both incremental content validity and incremental predictive validity.

Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the nature of the remember-know instructions given to participants influences whether these responses reflect different memory states or different degrees of memory confidence. Participants studied words and nonwords, a variable that has been shown to dissociate confidence from remember-know judgments and were given a set of published remember-know instructions that either emphasized know judgments as highly confident (Experiment 1) or as less confident (Experiment 2) states of recognition. Experiment 1 replicated the standard finding showing that remembering and knowing were differently influenced by the word-nonword variable, whereas confidence responses were not. By contrast, Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of data for remember-know and sure-unsure responses, thus demonstrating the importance of the instructions for interpreting the relationship between remembering and knowing and confidence.

Four experiments examined subjective experience during retrieval in the DRM false memory paradigm [Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58 , 17–22; Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21 , 803–814]. Subjects studied lists of related words that were associated with critical non-presented words and then took a recognition test in which they made judgments about their experience of each test item. We tested the prediction from [Whittlesea, B. W. A. (2002). False memory and the discrepancy–attribution hypothesis: The prototype-familiarity illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131 , 96–115] discrepancy–attribution hypothesis that subjects experience critical lures as surprising, and that the experience of surprise leads them to call the lures old. We found that subjects were not surprised when they encountered critical lures on a recognition test and, in fact, they reported that they expected to see critical lures more than they expected to see words that they had actually studied. When subjects did experience words as surprising, they called the words new, not old. The results support the idea that false memories in the DRM paradigm occur when critical lures are activated in memory and fluently processed on a test, leading subjects to experience critical lures in much the same way that they experience words they actually studied. The results do not support the idea that false memories are surprising, as stated by the discrepancy–attribution hypothesis.

The current study examined delayed recall of items that had been processed during simple and complex span tasks. Three experiments were reported showing that despite more items being recalled initially from a simple span task (i.e., word span) than a complex span task (i.e., operation span), on a delayed recall test more items were recalled that had initially been processed during the complex span task. This delayed recall advantage for items processed during complex span tasks persisted when subjects were encouraged to process the items deeply during the initial span task (Experiment 2), and when initial recall during the span task was precluded (Experiment 3). The covert retrieval model explains these data as being the result of subjects maintaining items in working memory during complex span tasks by covertly retrieving them during the processing phases of the tasks. These covert retrieval attempts provide distributed practice retrieving items from long-term memory, creating effective retrieval cues for later delayed recall that are not created during simple span tasks. The covert retrieval model was supported by data showing that words presented in earlier serial positions during operation span, which had the greatest likelihood of being covertly retrieved, were most likely to be recalled on the delayed recall test. These data support the notion that complex working memory span tasks share considerable processing overlap with episodic memory tasks.