Face Validity of Remembering and Knowing: Empirical Consensus and Disagreement Between Participants and Researchers

Abstract

Ever since Endel Tulving first distinguished between episodic and semantic memory, the remember/know paradigm has become a standard means of probing the phenomenology of participants’ memorial experiences by memory researchers, neuropsychologists, neuroscientists, and others. However, this paradigm has not been without its problems and has been used to capture many different phenomenological experiences, including retrieval from episodic versus semantic memory, recollection versus familiarity, strength of memory traces, and so on. We first conducted a systematic review of its uses across the literature and then examined how memory experts, other cognitive psychology experts, experts in other areas of psychology, and lay participants (Amazon Mechanical Turk workers) define what it means when one says “I remember” and “I know.” From coding their open-ended responses using a number of theory-bound dimensions, it seems that lay participants do not see eye to eye with memory experts in terms of associating “I remember” responses with recollection and “I know” responses with familiarity. However, there is general consensus with Tulving’s original distinction, linking remembering with memory for events and knowing with semantic memory. Recommendations and implications across fields are discussed.