The Language of Recollection in Support of Recognition Memory Decisions

Researchers often augment recognition memory decisions with confidence ratings or reports of “Remember” and “Know” experiences. While important, these ratings are subject to variation in interpretation and misspecification. Here we review recent findings from a “verbal reports as data” procedure in which subjects justify, in their own words, the basis of recognition. The application of a language pattern classifier to these justifications demonstrates that it: (a) is sensitive to the presence of recollection, (b) tracks individual differences in recognition accuracy, and (c) generalizes in a theoretically meaningful way to justifications from a separate experiment. More broadly, this approach should be useful for any cognitive decision task in which competing theories suggest different explicit bases underlying the judgments, or for which the explicit versus implicit basis of the decisions is in question.