Expertise and recollective experience: recognition memory for familiar and unfamiliar academic subjects

Two experiments investigated whether expertise effects in recognition memory could be found for different academic subjects. The roles of subjective experience and repetition on such effects were also explored. Experiment 1 showed that overall recognition memory was greater for familiar than for unfamiliar academic words (the expertise effect). Additionally, this effect was attributable to the subjective experience of remembering rather than knowing. Experiment 2 showed that repetition of stimulus items at study eliminated these expertise effects. Previous research has generally failed to find expertise effects in overall recognition memory. The present findings show that expertise effects do occur in overall recognition memory and are associated with the richer memorial experience of remembering rather than knowing.

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