Two dichotomies of recognition memory

Murdock (1974, Human Memory: Theory and Data, Lawrence Erlbaum) distinguished between the encoding and retrieval of item information (the representation of individual events) and associative information (the representation of relations between separate events). Mandler (1980, Psychological Review, 87, 252-271) proposed that recognition decisions could be based on the sense of familiarity engendered by the stimulus or on the retrieval of conceptual, semantic, and contextual information about the target. These two distinctions have motivated a considerable amount of research over the past 40 years and have provided much of the bases for our current understanding of recognition memory. Selective aspects of this research are reviewed to show how theories of recognition memory have developed to embody these two dichotomies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).