Commentary on: Recollection reduces unitised familiarity effect

The dual-process theory of recognition memory posits that recognition is supported by two separable processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity is the feeling of previously encountering something, without retrieval of contextual information about that encounter, whereas recollection refers to additional retrieval of contextual details (Yonelinas, 2002). While it is generally agreed that recognition of a single item can be supported by both processes, memory for novel associations between items is usually thought to require recollection (e. one situation when memory for an association between items might be supported by familiarity is when the items are bound together as a single unit; so-called " unitization " (e. Shao et al. (2015) recently reported interesting differences between two tasks that have been used to investigate the effects of unitization on associative recognition. In the first, compound task (Experiments 1 and 2), participants' memory for initially-unrelated stimuli was tested after two types of encoding. In the definition condition, the words were given a definition that enabled a new, unitized concept. This condition was compared against the sentence condition, where the words were presented as separate components of a sentence. In the second, imagery task (Experiment 3), the same types of words were used, but unitization was tested by comparing interactive-imagery condition (" create an image of the items interacting together ") with an item-imagery condition (" create a separate image for each item "). Shao et al.'s driving hypothesis was that the imagery task engages more recollection than the compound task, due to the flexibility afforded by adopting self-generated, elaborative encoding strategies. They further suggested that this increased recollection reduces the contribution of familiarity to the associative recognition task. They tested this hypothesis by combining both types of task with the Remember/Know procedure. In Experiment 1, they replicated the unitization advantage in the compound task. In Experiment 2 they found that this advantage was associated with increased familiarity. However, when using the imagery task in Experiment 3, they found that interactive imagery, which was supposed to encourage unitization, produced increased recollection and reduced familiarity. The authors claimed that this supports their hypothesis that when the memory trace is easily recollected (e.g., following interactive-imagery), the need for familiarity assessment is redundant, and so the effect of unitization on familiarity disappears. Although intriguing, we would like to offer alternative perspectives on both methodological and theoretical aspects of their report, which lead to the opposite conclusion. Our …