Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reaction time distributions in recognition conditions were compared to those in cued recall to explore the time course of retrieval, to test current models, and to provide constraints for the development of n e w models (including, to take an example, the class of recurrent neural nets, since they naturally produce reaction time predictions). Two different experimental paradigms were used. Results from a free response procedure showed fundamental differences between the two test modes, both in mean reaction time and the general shape of the distributions. Analysis of data from a signal-to-respond procedure revealed large differences between recognition and recall in the rate of growth of performance. These results suggest the existence of different processes underlying retrieval in recognition and cued recall. One model posits parallel activation of separate memory traces; for recognition, the summed activation is used for a decision, but for recall a search is based on sequential probabilistic choices from the traces. Further constraining models was the observation of nearly identical reaction time distributions for positive and negative responses in recognition, suggesting a single process for recognition decisions for targets and distractors.