Know versus Familiar: Differentiating states of awareness in others' subjective reports of recognition

In the Remember-Know paradigm whether a Know response is defined as a high-confidence state of certainty or a low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers and can influence participants' responses. The current experiment was designed to explore differences between the states of Know and Familiar. Participants studied others' justification statements to "Know" recognition decisions and separated them into two types. Crucially, participants were not provided definitions of Know and Familiar on which to sort the items--their judgements were based solely on the phenomenology described in the justifications. Participants' sorting decisions were shown to reliably map onto expert classification of Know and Familiar. Post-task questionnaire responses demonstrated that both the level of memory detail and confidence expressed in the justifications were central to how participants categorised the items. In sum, given no instructions to do so, participants classify Familiar and Know according to two dimensions: confidence and amount of information retrieved.