Familiarity In The RWCR Paradigm And Its Influence Factors

In daily life, people sometimes feel of having encountered a stimulus previously, even when they fail to recall the prior experience fails (Ryals, Cleary & Seger,2013). Familiarity was defined as the sense of having prior experience without specifics (Whittlesea & Williams,2000). The single-process theory and the dual-process theory were developed to illustrate the mechanism of familiarity. The single-process theory assumes that recognition decisions are based on a continuous, unidimensional memory-strength variable that reflects a singular process like familiarity. The dual-process theory assumes that recognition is based on two processes that are called:recollection and familiarity (Yonelinas,2002). Recollection-based recognition depends on retrieval of specifics about a prior experience. Familiarity-based recognition occurs when a current situation elicits a mere sense of prior experience without specifics. Thus, when recollection fails, it is still possible to recognize a situation as familiar.In recent years, the new paradigm, the Recognition without cued recall (RWCR) paradigm was deveploped to study the mechanism of familiarity. In the RWCR paradigm, participants first study a list of items followed by a cue recall test. During the cue recall test, half of the cues resemble studied items on one particular feature (e.g. study word:obstruction; test word:obstetrician) and half of them resemble nonstudied items (e.g. unversed) on that feature. Then, participants are asked to use the cue to recall a similar item from the study list, and to give familiarity ratings regardless of whether they recall an item successfully or not. The results demonstrate that even when participants cannot use the cue to recall one item, their familiarity ratings to the cues resemble studied items are higher than the cues resemble nonstudied items, which means participants might use particular features of studied items to rise feelings of familiarity. The RWCR paradigm increasingly was used to study the perceptual information which could give rise to the familiarity. Cleary et.al, (2000) reported findings suggesting that letters could elicit the RWCR effect. Both orthographic and phonological features could elicit the RWCR effect. In addition, the Rhythm and pitch could elicit the RWCR effect. Cleary and Reyes (2009) also found that pictures of famous scenes were the features to give rise to the RWCR effect.Semantic information is very important in the representation of familiarity; however, it is still controversial that whether semantic information could lead to familiarity in the absence of recall (Yonelinas,2002). In the present study, the RWCR paradigm was used to address questions about the role of semantic features of Chinese characters in familiarity.Furthermore, another open question remains as to whether the effects of testing and restudying on recollection and familiarity are dissociative. In Chan&. McDermott’s (2007) experiment, initial testing was shown to enhance later recollection but leave familiarity unchanged. Verkoeijen et.al, (2011) found that recognition decisions were more familiarity based for restudied words than for tested words. However, several researchers have challenged the validity of the tasks of their study. Thus, in the present study, the RWCR paradigm and testing effect paradigm were used to address questions about the role of forgetting in familiarity. In this research, we explored the RWCR effect in Chinese characters learning, and used the RWCR paradigm to examine the effects of testing and restudying.In experiment 1, we examined whether the semantics of a Chinese character can produce the RWCR effect. The results showed that the RWCR effect could occur when the cues resembled studied items semantically in logographic Chinese characters.In experiment 2, we seeked to further explore the role of semantic features on the RWCR effect by manipulating the presentation of study items and cued items in cross-language conditions (i.e., Chinese-English) to minimize the interference of perceptual information, and the results revealed that recognition without cued recall still occurred. These results provide strong evidence that semantic information could give rise to the feelings of familiarity, as well as perceptual information, which could help to eliminate the controversy on whether semantic information can elicit the feelings of familiarity from a new perspective.In experiment 3, we explored the effects of testing and restudying on recollection and familiarity. The final recognition test was taken immediately after the learning phase. The results showed that when the final test was taken immediately after the study phase, both restudying and testing lead to better recollection performance than the studying-once encoding did. Meanwhile, there was an advantage of restudy over test encoding, and restudy encoding led to better familiarity performance relative to testing and study-once encoding. In addition, there was no difference between test encoding and studying-once encoding.In Experiment 4, we seeked to further explore RWCR effects after one week delay. The results showed that when the final test was taken afeter one week, there were no differences in the familiarity performance between the restudying condition and test condition, however familiarity performance in restudying condition declined faster than that in the testing condition.Taken together, the results demonstrated that, (a) the semantics of word would also elicit the RWCR effect in logographically scripted language (i.e., Chinese), and in cross-language conditions (i.e., Chinese-English), (b) After short retention interval, relative to studying words once, takeing a restudying increased familiarity and recollection, whereas testing did not affect familiarity, (c) After long retention interval, there were no differences in the familiarity performance between the restudy condition and testing condition.