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This study shows that the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state--the sense that a word is in memory when its retrieval fails--is used as a heuristic for inferring that an inaccessible word has characteristics that are consistent with greater word perceptibility. When reporting a TOT state, people judged an unretrieved word as more likely to have previously appeared darker and clearer (Experiment 1a), and larger (Experiment 1b). They also judged an unretrieved word as more likely to be a high frequency word (Experiment 2). This was not because greater fluency or word perceptibility at encoding led to later TOT states: Increased fluency or perceptibility of a word at encoding did not increase the likelihood of a TOT state for it when its retrieval later failed; moreover, the TOT state was not diagnostic of an unretrieved word's fluency or perceptibility when it was last seen. Results instead suggest that TOT states themselves are used as a heuristic for inferring the likely characteristics of unretrieved words. During the uncertainty of retrieval failure, TOT states are a source of information on which people rely in reasoning about the likely characteristics of the unretrieved information, choosing characteristics that are consistent with greater fluency of processing.

Recent work (e.g., Nairne & Pandeirada, 2010) has shown that words are remembered better when they have been processed for their survival value in a grasslands context than when processed in other contexts. It has been suggested that this is because human memory systems were shaped by evolution specifically to help humans survive. Thus far, the survival processing advantage has mainly been shown with grasslands contexts, which are thought to be particularly relevant to human evolution. The present study demonstrated the survival processing advantage with other contexts (e.g., lost in a jungle), including with contexts that should not, in and of themselves, be relevant to human evolution (e.g., lost in outer space). We further examined whether implied social isolation plays a critical role in the survival advantage to memory by comparing scenarios in which the person is alone versus with other people present (e.g., lost at sea alone or with others), and whether the perceived source of danger is social isolation or other human attackers. A survival advantage was shown in both the isolation and the group settings, and whether the primary source of danger was isolation or other human attackers did not matter. These findings suggest that the survival advantage in memory is not dependent on evolutionarily relevant physical contexts (e.g., grasslands) or particular sources of perceived danger (social isolation vs. perceived attackers), showing the advantage to be robust and applicable to a variety of scenarios. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Recognition without identification (RWI) is a common day-to-day experience (as when recognizing a face or a tune as familiar without being able to identify the person or the song). It is also a well-established laboratory-based empirical phenomenon: When identification of recognition test items is prevented, participants can discriminate between studied and unstudied test items. The present study demonstrates this finding in the realm of music. A song RWI effect is reported across 4 experiments, despite very low identification rates in each. The effect was found with unidentifiable song fragments (Experiment 1), with song notes removed from their original rhythms (Experiment 2), and with songs unidentifiable from their tapped out rhythms (Experiments 3 and 4). Theoretical implications of these results are relevant to both the study of familiarity-based recognition and the study of music cognition. (Contains 7 footnotes and 2 tables.)

Recognition without identification is the finding that, among recognition test items that go unidentified (as when a word is unidentified from a fragment), participants can discriminate those that were studied from those that were unstudied. In the present study, we extended this phenomenon to the more life-like situation of discriminating known from novel stimuli. Pictures of famous and nonfamous faces (Exp. 1), famous and nonfamous scenes (Exp. 2), and threatening and nonthreatening images (Exp. 3) were filtered in order to impede identification. As in list-learning recognition-without-identification paradigms, participants attempted to identify each image (e.g., whose face it was, what scene it was, or what was in the picture) and rated how familiar the image seemed on a scale of 0 ( very unfamiliar) to 10 ( very familiar). Among the unidentified stimuli, higher familiarity ratings were given to famous than to nonfamous faces (Exp. 1) and scenes (Exp. 2), and to threatening than to nonthreatening living/animate (but not to nonliving/nonanimate) images (Exp. 3). These findings suggest that even when a stimulus is too occluded to allow for conscious identification, enough information can be processed to allow a sense of familiarity or novelty with it, which appears also to be related to the sense of whether or not a living creature is a threat. That the sense of familiarity for unidentified stimuli may be related to threat detection for living or animate things suggests that it may be an adaptive aspect of human memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the recognition-without-identification (RWI) and feeling-of-knowing (FOK) paradigms attempt to tap participants' sense about a target that is inaccessible. In the case of RWI, participants judge the likelihood that the inaccessible target was studied. In the case of FOKs, participants judge the likelihood that the inaccessible target will be recognized at a later point in time. The present study compared the two using a hybrid paradigm. The patterns of responding differed depending on whether the judgment was of the RWI type or the FOK type. For the former, ratings were significantly higher for studied than for unstudied inaccessible targets (the typical RWI effect). For the latter, ratings were significantly lower for studied than for unstudied inaccessible targets (a reversal of the usual RWI effect). Similarity of the targets and distractors diminished the usual RWI effect, but not its reversal in the FOK situation, suggesting that the bases of the two effects differ. A potential explanation is that when participants judge whether an inaccessible target was presented earlier, they are oriented toward relying on cue familiarity, which should be greater for cues of studied targets, whereas when they judge whether they will recognize an inaccessible target later on, they are oriented toward relying on the accessibility of information, which is greater in the unstudied condition, due to the lack of priming of the targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how participants' predictions of future memory performance are influenced by emotional facial expressions. Participants made judgements of learning (JOLs) predicting the likelihood that they would correctly identify a face displaying a happy, angry, or neutral emotional expression in a future two-alternative forced-choice recognition test of identity (i.e., recognition that a person's face was seen before). JOLs were higher for studied faces with happy and angry emotional expressions than for neutral faces. However, neutral test faces with studied neutral expressions had significantly higher identity recognition rates than neutral test faces studied with happy or angry expressions. Thus, these data are the first to demonstrate that people believe happy and angry emotional expressions will lead to better identity recognition in the future relative to neutral expressions. This occurred despite the fact that neutral expressions elicited better identity recognition than happy and angry expressions. These findings contribute to the growing literature examining the interaction of cognition and emotion.