Benjamin A S, Bjork R A, Hirshman E
Department of Psychology, UCLA 90095-1563.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 1998 Apr;98(2-3):267-90. doi: 10.1016/s0001-6918(97)00046-2.
The subjective sense of fluency with which an item can be perceived or remembered is proposed to be a vital cue in making decisions about the future memorability and the nature of our past experience with that stimulus. We first outline a number of cases in which such perceptual or retrieval fluency influences judgments both about our own future performance and our likely past experience, and then present a Bayesian analysis of how judgments of recognition--deciding whether or not a currently viewed item was studied at a particular point in the past--may incorporate information about the perceptual fluency of that item. Using a simple mathematical model, we then provide an interpretation of certain enigmatic phenomena in recognition memory.
