Item versus associative information: A comparison of forgetting rates with and without recollective experience

Past experiments examining the relationship between recognition memory and the recollective experience has consistently focused on single word stimuli. The present study was designed to assess the nature of this relationship with associative information in addition to item information. Two experiments are reported in which participants studied a list of random word pairs, and were subsequently given a recognition memory test for both item and associative information. Of those recognized events, participants were asked to indicate which words or word pairs they could and could not recollect from the study phase. Participants returned either 2 and 7 days later (Experiment 1) or 30 minutes and 1 day later (Experiment 2) to take a delayed memory test. The findings showed that across a 1-week delay, item and associative information did not differ with respect to forgetting rates. The two types of stimuli did differ with respect to recollective experience, with associative information eliciting a greater proportion of remember responses than did item information. These findings provide further evidence for the distinction between item and associative recognition memory, as well as extending previous research on recollective experience