The Influence Of Study Duration And Level-of-Processing On Familiarity

The dual-process model suggests that both recollection and familiarity contribute to recognition memory.Previous studies have revealed that both longer study duration and deeper level-of-processing led to higher recollection accuracy.However,literatures were controversial when concluding whether these variables also affect familiarity.The recognition without cued recall(RWCR)paradigm focuses on measuring familiarity effectively.By using word pairs which resembled in meaning as materials,this study aims to use the RWCR paradigm to further investigate the influence of study duration and level-of-processing on familiarity,respectively.In Experiment 1,the study duration was manipulated(500ms vs.2000ms)to examine its influence on familiarity after controlling for level-of-processing.In Experiment 2,participants were asked to finish a color judgment task within 500ms to examine the influence of the lowered level-of-processing on familiarity in short study duration condition.Experiment 3 was a supplement to experiment 2,which made the subjects do less key press actions in order to exclude the influence of key press action on the results of experiment 2.In Experiment 1,results demonstrated that the variation of study duration did not affect familiarity significantly after controlling for level-of-processing.However,In Experiment 2,shallow level-of-processing impaired familiarity in short study duration.In experiment 3,results showed that key press action didn't influence familiarity,which suggested that the change of familiarity in experiment2 resulted from the variation of the level-of-processing.Taken together,this study used a new paradigm to investigate the influence of study duration and level-of-processing on familiarity.These results could provide new evidences for the controversy about effects of study duration and level-of-processing on familiarity in recognition.