The role of integration in recognition failure and action memory

Abstract

In three experiments, we studied memory for action events with respect to exceptions from the Tulving-Wiseman function demonstrated in experiments on recognition failure of recallable words. In Experiment 1, we examined exceptions of poor integration in a regular recognition failure condition (i.e., recognition of targets without contextual cues, followed by recall of targets in the presence of contextual cues). In Experiment 2, we examined exceptions of cue overlap in which subjects also had access to the information of contextual cues at recognition test. In Experiment 3, we attempted to equate the levels of recognition across the action and verbal encoding. In addition, the cue overlap and no-cue overlap conditions were studied in a within-subjects design. Results from the three experiments indicated that encoding enactment (episodic integration) and conceptual integration (semantic integration) are related to each other. As a consequence of this relationship, there is a larger independence between recognition and recall of well-integrated items with encoding enactment. On the other hand, for the poorly integrated items without encoding enactment, there is a larger dependence between recognition and recall. Even in the cue overlap condition, where there is a case of large dependence between recognition and recall, the same pattern of data was observed. The results are discussed in terms of an episodic integration view of encoding enactment.