Familiarity and the Retrieval of Memory Traces

Abstract

Cue familiarity has been proposed as a mechanism by which the Feeling of Knowing and illusions of knowing might be established. Kamas and Reder (1995) describe a ‘partial matching’ process that would determine familiarity and may play an important role in explaining various shortcomings of metacognitive heuristics. This process is developed into the more ambitious Source of Activation Confusion model (SAC) in later work (Nhouyvanisvong & Reder, 1998; Schunn, Reder et al., 1997). We examine two domains for which the mechanism has been proposed and discuss a number of theoretical opportunities the proposition offers.