An ARC-REM model for accuracy and response time in recognition and recall

This article presents a model for accuracy and response time (RT) in recognition and cued recall, fitted to free-response and signal-to-respond data from Experiment 1 of P. A. Nobel and R. M. Shiffrin (2001). The model posits that recognition operates through parallel activation in a single retrieval step and cued recall operates as a sequential search. Because the data for recognition showed that variations in list length and study time per list had a large effect on accuracy but a small or negligible effect on (a) free-response RT distributions and (b) retrieval dynamics in signal-to-respond, the timing of the recognition decision is based on an assessment of retrieval completion (ARC), rather than on a sufficiency of evidence in favor of 1 of the response options. By assuming within-trial forgetting, the model predicts both the dissociation of accuracy and RT and the finding that errors are slower than correct responses. For cued recall, this model was incorporated as the 1st step in a search consisting of cycles of sampling and recovery.