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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.)

Among cues that fail to elicit successful recall, participants can still discriminate between cues that do and do not resemble studied items. This ability is referred to as recognition without cued recall (RWCR). We hypothesized that whereas recognition with cued recall is at least partly based on recalled studied information, RWCR results from a feature-matching process whereby cue features are matched with features in memory to produce a variable familiarity signal that is stronger when there is a greater match. To create some degree of feature-match at test, we used non-word cues (e.g., foneheed) that potentially graphemically resembled studied words (e.g., forehead). In Experiments 1 and 2, study word features that were not reinstated in the test cues themselves (study word concreteness and study word emotionality) affected recognition with recall but did not affect RWCR. In Experiment 3, RWCR was shown to be greater when there was a greater degree of match between the features in the cue and those in memory, and differed from recognition with recall in this regard. These results support a feature-matching theory of RWCR. More broadly, they support dual-process theories of recognition in suggesting that there are at least two different bases for recognition memory decisions: recalled information in response to the test item, or a sense of familiarity with the test item brought on by the type of feature-matching process described by global matching models of recognition. (Contains 8 tables.)

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.)

Early studies of human memory suggest that adherence to a known structural regularity (e.g., orthographic regularity) benefits memory for an otherwise novel stimulus (e.g., G. A. Miller, 1958). However, a more recent study suggests that structural regularity can lead to an increase in false-positive responses on recognition memory tests (B. W. A. Whittlesea & L. D. Williams, 1998). In the present study the authors attempted to identify the circumstances under which structural regularity benefits old-new discrimination and those under which it leads to an increase in false-positive responses. The highly generalizable tendency shown here is for structural regularity to benefit old-new discrimination. The increase in false-positive responses for structurally regular novel items may be limited to situations in which regularity is confounded with similarity to studied items.