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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The cognitive neuropsychology of recollection

subject

description

The recognition of whether someone, something or somewhere has been experienced before rests on a decisionmaking process. In humanmemory, information is not reproduced as it would be in a computer, but is a reflective, conscious process. This is more so the case when encountering the same scene, environment or idea for a second time. When we recognize something as having been encountered before we arguably make a comparison between what is represented in the cognitive system and what is currently perceived. Consider that somebody uses the word ‘loquacious’, a word which you have only just encountered recently, and up until then, you did not know its meaning, or even existence. When encountering the word a second time, a number of processes and sources of information bring to bear on your processing of the word: how fluently you can process it, its distinctiveness in the perceptual trace, the feelings generated when encountering it a second time, the effort involved in retrieving its meaning, and whether you can recall the specifics of your first encounter with the word. This information can be used to retrieve the meaning of the word, or to gauge the certainty with which you have encountered the word before, and so on. Recent advances in human decision making suggest that complex tasks requiring problem solving and judgement rely on two categories of information, giving rise to dual process models of reasoning and judgement (Evans, 2008; Kahneman, 2011). The dual process account explains how people make decisions based on two separable streams of information: a fast, intuitive feeling and a slower, more deliberative evaluation, captured in the quote fromCharles Darwin, above. These separable processes in cognition are arguably at play in memory decision making too (e.g., Arango-Munoz, 2010; Hintzman and Curran, 1994; Koriat and Levy-Sadot, 2001) and map neatly onto the concepts of familiarity and recollection (for reviews see Mandler, 2008; Yonelinas, 2002), two key concepts which we describe below. In fact, the neurosciences have long had dual process theorists who posit two separate processes in the mind, probably inspired by the division of the brain into two hemispheres. Many early scholars posited that the brain was a ‘double organ’ (e.g., Holland, 1840). Wigan’s influential text (1844), The Duality of the Mind was an extreme position: that there were literally two separate brains which could work with each other or against each other. It was this kind of physiological view of the dual brain that Ribot drew upon in his early conceptions of human memory and its disorders (Taylor and Shuttleworth, 1998) and it undoubtedly influenced early theories of memory. In time, Stewart in the mid nineteenth century developed a distinction between recollectione the ability to consciously retrieve specific information e and memory more generally e a store of experiences and information which is not necessarily available for conscious report (Taylor and Shuttleworth, 1998). These dual process ideas of the mind have undoubtedly been influential in early neuroscientific works, but they have also helped shape the general public’s thinking on this matter: we can talk about being ‘in two minds’ about an issue, and many lay people’s conceptualization of deja vu e an infrequent but striking memory error e is that it arises from a mismatch between separate