Search Processes In Recognition Memory 1

This paper is concerned with a theoretical account of some phenomena in the field of recognition memory. Many tasks have been used to study the recognition process (for a review see McCormack, 1972, and Kintsch, 1970), but we will focus on a particular procedure that has been extensively investigated in recent years. This task, introduced by Sternberg (1966) and often referred to as “memory scanning,” involves a series of discrete trials. On each trial a test stimulus is presented, and the subject is required to decide whether or not the stimulus is a member of a previously defined target set. The subject is instructed to make a positive (”yes") response if the test stimulus is from the target set, and a…