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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 28, 2026

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory

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Published on: January 31, 2017

Relative fluency and illusions of recognition memory.

Deanne L Westerman¹

¹Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA. wester@binghamton.edu

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

|November 13, 2008

Summary

Familiar stimuli feel like they "pop out" due to perceptual fluency. This study found that recognition memory illusions are stronger when fewer familiar items appear among unfamiliar ones.

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Human Perception

Background:

Perceptual fluency describes the ease of processing familiar stimuli.
This ease can create a subjective experience of familiarity, akin to recognizing a friend in a crowd.
The influence of fluency on recognition memory, particularly in varied contexts, requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the relationship between the proportion of fluent stimuli and the strength of fluency-based illusions in recognition memory.
To determine if standard fluency manipulations affect recognition memory differently in between-participants versus within-participants designs.

Main Methods:

Participants were presented with recognition tests containing varying percentages of fluent (familiar) stimuli.

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Recognition memory responses were recorded and analyzed in relation to the proportion of fluent items.

Standard fluency manipulations were applied in between-participants designs to assess their impact.

Main Results:

The magnitude of fluency-based illusions in recognition memory was inversely proportional to the percentage of fluent stimuli presented.
Recognition memory was not significantly impacted by standard fluency manipulations in between-participants designs.
Illusion strength increased as the density of fluent stimuli decreased within the recognition test.

Conclusions:

Fluency-based illusions of recognition memory are more pronounced in contexts with a lower proportion of fluent stimuli.
The effectiveness of fluency manipulations on recognition memory may depend on the experimental design (within- vs. between-participants).
Contextual factors, specifically the density of familiar items, play a critical role in shaping recognition memory illusions.