Tulving's (1989) Doctrine of Concordance Revisited

Abstract

The Doctrine of Concordance is the implicit assumption that cognitive processes, behavior, and phenomenological experience are highly correlated (Tulving, 1989). Tulving challenged this assumption, pointing to domains in which conscious experience did not accompany a particular measured cognitive process and to situations in which consciousness did not correlate with the observable behavior. Schwartz (1999) extended this view, asserting that the underlying cognitive processes that produce conscious experience may differ from those that produce observable behavior. Though research on conscious experience blossomed during the last quarter century and progress has been made in moving past the Doctrine of Concordance, we argue that some subdomains within memory research remain hampered by an implicit endorsement of it. We outline two areas of memory research in which current research and interpretations appear to fall prey to the Doctrine today: research on the dual- vs. single-process theory in recognition memory, including work on remember/know judgments, and research on retrospective memory confidence. We then describe four areas of research that show progress in understanding conscious experience by rejecting the Doctrine of Concordance: These are 1) metacognitive disconnects in the science of learning, 2) recognition illusions, 3) déjà vu experiences, and 4) aha experiences. We claim that there is often a dissociation between the mechanisms that create conscious experience and the underlying cognitive processes that contribute to behaviors, which may seem causally correlated with conscious experience. Disentangling the relations between process, behavior, and conscious experience in the human mind's operation are important to understanding it.

Keywords: Doctrine of Concordance; confidence; conscious experience; consciousness; dual process theories of recognition; déjà vu experience; experience; metacognition; remember/know judgments; retrospective confidence; subjective experience.

Figure 1

Model 1 shows a conceptualization of the Doctrine of Concordance. The same cognitive process is responsible for both consciousness and behavior, leading to a strong correlation between cognitive processes, consciousness, and behavior. Model 2 shows the challenge to the Doctrine of Concordance elaborated by Schwartz (1999). In it one cognitive process leads to conscious experience, whereas a second cognitive process leads to observable behavior. This general model can account for why we observe dissociations between cognitive processes, consciousness, and behavior.

Figure 2

Illustration of a hypothetical situation in which an object-level basic cognitive process, an overt behavior, and a meta-level conscious subjective experience are interrelated, yet each based on a different underlying mechanism. Here, the hypothesized meta-level conscious experience of a sensation of familiarity (C) arises from a different mechanism than the object-level process of familiarity signal computation (A) and there is not direct conscious access to the output from (A). Figure adapted from Figure 2 of Cleary et al. (2025), an illustration of the familiarity-flip-of-attention theory. A) depicts the object-level familiarity signal intensity value output from the global-feature-matching-based familiarity signal computation specified in the MINERVA 2 model (Hintzman, 1988). B) depicts an overt behavior: Eye-gaze aversion—an indicator of shutting out visual inputs to focus attention inward toward memory (Servais et al., 2023). C) Depicts a meta-level subjective conscious experience: The feeling of familiarity; in this case, the feeling of familiarity results not from direct access to the familiarity signal intensity value output depicted in A), but rather from conscious detection of the fact that one’s attention is inward-focused on searching memory for something that has yet to come to mind.