Identifying exceptions in a database of recognition failure studies from 1973 to 1992

This paper presents a database of all published studies based on the recognition failure paradigm, which involves the study of pairs of items followed by a recognition test of the second item of each pair and a recall test of the same target item with the first item of each pair provided as a context cue. The paper also identifies, on the basis of a quantitative analysis, exceptions to the recognition failure function encompassing most data in the database. The database includes reference information about each study and a short description of materials and the manipulations made in each of the 302 experimental conditions reported. The database also includes information about the total number of observations for each condition, the overall hit rate in free or forced choice recognition, the overall probability of recall, the observed probability of recognition given recall, the predicted probability of recognition given recall, the difference between observed and predicted values, and the critical ratio between these difference scores and their overall standard deviation.