Recallable but not Recognizable: The Influence of Semantic Priming in Recall Paradigms

When people can successfully recall a studied word, they should be able to recognize it as having been studied. In cued recall paradigms, however, participants sometimes correctly recall words in the presence of strong semantic cues but then fail to recognize those words as actually having been studied. Although the conditions necessary to produce this unusual effect are known, the underlying neural correlates have not been investigated. Across two experiments, involving both behavioral and electrophysiological methods (EEG), we investigated the cognitive and neural processes that underlie recognition failures. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that, in cued recall paradigms, presuming that recalled items can be recognized is a flawed assumption: Recognition failures occur in the presence of cues, regardless of whether those failures are measured. Experiment 2 showed that successfully recalled words that are recognized are driven by recollection at recall and by a combination of recollection and familiarity at recognition; in contrast, recognition failures are driven by semantic priming at recall and followed by negative-going ERP effects consistent with implicit processes such as repetition fluency and context familiarity at recognition. These results demonstrate that recall—long-characterized as predominantly reflecting recollection-based processing in episodic memory—can at times also be served by a confluence of implicit cognitive processes.