The role of metacognitive knowledge in recollection rejection

JAMES MICHAEL LAMPINEN and JACK D. ARNAL
University of Arkansas

Recollection rejection is a memory editing mechanism in which related lures are rejected because of the recollection of the lure's instantiating target (e.g., "I know it wasn't pretty because it was beautiful"). According to one view, recollection rejection requires an assumption on the part of the participant that both a word and its related lure could not have been studied. We examined this view by manipulating the instructions that were given to participants (Experiment 1) and the nature of the study list (Experiment 2). Estimates of recollection rejection derived from the phantom receive operating characteristic model found evidence for the role of metacognitive assumptions, but only when metacognitive knowledge was manipulated by varying the nature of the study list.