Recognition Memory (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia’s article on recognition memory.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Key points

• Recognition memory matches a re-encountered item against a stored memory representation; it splits into recollection (slow, controlled, hippocampus-associated) and familiarity (fast, automatic, perirhinal-cortex-associated).
• The “butcher-on-the-bus” phenomenon: recognizing someone as familiar with no recollection of who they are or how they’re known, illustrating familiarity firing ahead of recollection.
• A caution against recognition-only testing: a customer can recognize an option as familiar without that meaning it’s the correct one, producing false confidence.
• Recognition carries a plausible evolutionary basis (faster threat appraisal) for why it’s generally faster and more automatic than recall.

Cited In

Principles

• Recognition Over Recall