Comparing two unitisation manipulations: effects on familiarity, recollection-based recognition, and semantic interference

ABSTRACT

The recognition of associative memory can be significantly influenced by the use of an encoding strategy known as unitisation, which has been implemented through various manipulations. However, [Shao, H., Opitz, B., Yang, J., & Weng, X. (2016). Recollection reduces unitised familiarity effect. Memory (Hove, England), 24(4), 535–547. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2015.1021258] found intriguing distinctions between two common manipulations, the compound task and the imagery task, leading to a dispute. We propose that differences in levels of processing in the imagery task may account for these discrepancies. This study tested our hypothesis using two approaches. The first two experiments utilised the R/K paradigm to investigate the effects of these methods on familiarity-based and recollection-based recognition. The results demonstrated that familiarity was increased in the compound task, while recollection was increased in the imagery task. In the subsequent two experiments, an interference paradigm was employed to examine differences in semantic processing within the two tasks. The results showed that the compound task did not impact participants’ inclination towards lures, while the imagery task led to a bias towards semantic lures over episodic lures, suggesting that the two encodings in the imagery task involve different levels of semantic processing. These results support our hypothesis and underscore the importance of carefully choosing comparisons that account for other variables in the study of unitisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• unitisation
• recollection
• familiarity

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/yck29/?view_only=024e7adfc592476f8b9c493b05df0d05.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/yck29/?view_only=024e7adfc592476f8b9c493b05df0d05.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Psychology of Northeast Normal University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number: 32271095]. Natural Science Foundation of Jilin Province [grant number: 20230101149JC].