The recollective experience of cross-modality confusion errors

There are at least two qualitatively different types of subjective experience that can accompany accurate recognition memory. Sometimes recognition is accompanied by conscious recollection of the learning episode (i.e., it is remembered), and in other cases it is not (i.e., it is simply known that the item is old). In the present study, we assessed the subjective experience that accompanies cross-modality confusion errors (misidentifying words as pictures) by measuring the extent to which subjects claimed to remember versus know that the item was presented as a picture. The results of two experiments demonstrate that cross-modality confusion errors are often accompanied by conscious recollection, although not to the same extent as accurate memories. The findings also show that there is considerable overlap in the recollective experience that accompanies accurate and erroneous memories. Finally, the results support the contention that recollective experience cannot be directly inferred from test performance.