Study Of The Impact Of Test Sequence On Priming Effect In Recognition Memory

Results from the search of human recognition indicate that human recognition performance reflects two distinct processes: familiarity and recollection. The researchers have different arguments with the functions, nervous mechanism of familiarity and recollection. Global models of recognition make two fundamental claims: 1) All of the studied items are involved equally in the comparison to the test item; 2) decision uses a signal-detection mechanism to evaluate a scalar derived from the comparisons. The Iterative-Resonance Model premised a theory of recognition memory. The IRM challenged the two principles. The arguments of the two models have to be confirmed.The present study used study-test paradigm and adopted 64 colored Korean letters as stimuli. The purpose of our study is to explore the priming effects of different sequence types. All the subjects of the 3 experiments are undergraduate students. In the first study, learning 3 colored Korean letters was the task of study stage. In the test stage, the task was making "yes/no" judgments. The 3 studied items did not share any features. Lures were constructed by a studied feature paired with an extra feature. The result showed: In the sequence lure-lure, the two lures did not share any feature, but the two lures were both related to the same studied item. The second lure was primed. In the second study: The lures were constructed by the same extra feature paired a studied feature. In sequence lure-lure, the two lures had the same extra feature. The result showed: In the sequence lure-lure, the first lure primed the second lure when they shared an extra feature. In the third study: Subjects were asked to learn different four colored Korean letters and tested 32 test items. Lures were constructed by one studied feature paired a different extra feature. The result showed: There were no interjacent priming effects when the adjacent test items were linked and unrelated.The results of the 3 experiments showed: The recognition process may depend on the difficulty of the task. In the easy task, decision focuses on the comparison with the studied item that most similar to the test item. In the difficult task, all of the studied items are involved equally in the comparison to the test item.