Memory 243stored image or fact (Borges et al., 1977; Gillund & Shiffrin,
1984; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1992). Recognition is usually
much easier than recall because the cue is the actual object,
word, sound, and so on that one is simply trying to detect
as familiar and known. Examples of tests that use recog-
nition are multiple-choice, matching, and true–false tests.
The answer is right there and simply has to be matched to
the information already in memory.
Recognition tends to be very accurate for images,
especially human faces. In one study, more than 2,500 pho-
tographs were shown to participants at the rate of one every
10 seconds. Participants were then shown pairs of photo-
graphs in which one member of each pair was one of the
previously seen photographs. Accuracy for identifying the
previous photos was between 85 and 95 percent (Standing
et al., 1970).
Recognition isn’t foolproof, however. Sometimes,
there is just enough similarity between a stimulus that is
not already in memory and one that is in memory so that
a false positive occurs (Muter, 1978). A false positive occurs
when a person thinks that he or she has recognized (or even
recalled) something or someone but in fact does not have that something or someone in
memory.
False positives can become disastrous in certain situations. In one case, in a series
of armed robberies in Delaware, word had leaked out that the suspect sought by police
might be a priest. When police put Father Bernard Pagano in a lineup for witnesses to
identify, he was the only one in the lineup wearing a priest’s collar. Seven eyewitnesses
identified him as the man who had robbed them. Fortunately for Father Pagano, the real
robber confessed to the crimes halfway through Pagano’s trial (Loftus, 1987). Eyewitness
recognition can be especially prone to false positives, although most people seem to think
that “seeing is believing.” For more about the problems with eyewitnesses, see the fol-
lowing Classic Studies in Psychology.
©The New Yorker Collection 1988 Lee Lorenz from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.Watch the Video Methods for RememberingCC