I’d Know that Face Anywhere!

Mandler (1980) provided the classic “butcher on the bus ” example illustrating the feeling of familiarity without recollection that may arise when an acquaintance is encountered in an unusual context. We studied this phenomenon by pairing photos of faces with photos of distinctive contexts at study and later testing recognition memory and Remember/Know judgments for faces presented with studied, switched, or new contexts. Estimates of recollection and familiarity, based on the assumption that these processes are independent, showed that switching contexts significantly lowered recollection while leaving familiarity intact, just as Mandler described. False alarm rates were higher with old contexts, suggesting that subjects tended to misattribute memories of contexts to memories of faces. These results provide the first evidence of context effects on the subjective experience of recognizing faces. One-dimensional signal-detection models fit the data, but such models do not explain the difference in Remember responses between studied and switched items, whereas dual-process models (which also fit the data) do while also capturing the phenomenology of the butcher-on-the-bus experience in an intuitively appealing way. You’ve probably experienced the powerful (and nagging) feeling of knowing-without-remembering that sometimes arises when an acquaintance is encountere