Self-reflection and recognition: the role of metacognitive knowledge in the attribution of recollective experience

We argue that to understand how a recognition task is solved, it is helpful to study the inferences that are drawn on the basis of psychological self-knowledge. This claim is supported by findings from 3 experiments in which participants' metacognitive knowledge was either measured or manipulated. Specifically, it was found that when the quality of a recollective experience was not associated with one particular cause, knowledge about whether one would have noted or remembered a stimulus is used. In conclusion, we argue that a perspective that is derived from attribution theory in social psychology may be fruitfully applied to phenomena of recognition.