The output monitoring of performed actions: What can we learn from "recall-recognition" performance?

Memories of simple action phrases are retained better following subject-performed tasks (SPT) than verbal tasks (VT), and this superior memory performance of SPT over VT is referred to as the SPT effect. Although research has been conducted on the SPT effect for more than 30 years, how well participants recognize whether they recalled the items successfully and the relationship between item-specific processing encoding and automatic retrieval have not been addressed. The present study used a 2 (instruction: with or without pleasantness rating) × 2 (type of encoding: SPT or VT) between-subject design and applied a "recall-recognition" paradigm to explore the above issues. For the "recall-recognition" performance, the SPT (and the VT with the pleasantness-rating task) produce very poor recognition of the correct recall of the last items (recency effect) and still poorer recognition of the middle items relative to VT alone, indicating that the retrieval process of these items in SPT needs less intention, effort, or monitoring, happens instantly, and involves a more non-obvious memory trace than that in VT alone. This was taken as support for the idea that an emphasis on item-specific information leads to automatic retrieval and thus poor awareness of the prior correct recall. We suggest that the SPT effect can be explained from the perspective of both encoding and retrieval.