Recognition memory and introspective remember/know judgments: evidence for the influence of distractor plausibility on "remembering" and a caution about purportedly nonparametric measures.

One popular technique in the study of human recognition memory involves the elicitation of remember and know judgments and the attribution of those judgments to qualitative states of memory retrieval. An alternative view, reviewed here, implicates quantitative, but not qualitative, differences in evidence as the basis for those two judgments. That theory makes two clear and testable predictions: that of criterion shifts in "remembering" and that of isodiscriminability across different response sets. In this experiment, the makeup of the distractor set in a recognition test is shown to influence overall recognition criterion and also rates of "remember" responses. The second portion of the article demonstrates how A' is a poor choice of a measure to test the prediction of isodiscriminability. When this measure is corrected (Equation 7) to make it more consistent with current knowledge about the receiver-operating characteristic in recognition memory, it reveals that there is no difference in discriminability between "remember" and all positive responses.