Recollections of faces: remembering differences and knowing similarities

Components of recollective experience were investigated in 4 experiments in which participants studied either similarities or differences among faces (relational vs. distinctive processing). Subsequently, when recognizing a face, participants indicated whether their decision was based on explicit recollection (remembering) or assessment of familiarity (knowing). Type of encoding interacted with judgments of recollective experience, so that the incidence of "remember" responses was higher following distinctive encoding than following relational encoding, whereas the opposite pattern of results was obtained for "know" responses. Furthermore, recognition of appearance-changed faces was based on feelings of familiarity, rather than on explicit recollection. The results support the dual-component notion of recognition but are inconsistent with the idea that dissociations between remembering and knowing merely reflect differences in conceptual and perceptual processing.