Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

When people attempt to describe problems they face in remembering, they often claim that they can't "retrieve" something. The use of this term is indicative of the dominant theory of human memory: remembering consists of retrieval. In contrast to the retrieval view, recent research in cognitive psychology suggests that people rely on decision rules or "heuristics" when making decisions about the past (e.g., Kleider & Goldinger, 2006). To illustrate, suppose a Professor is trying to recall whether the usual "two meetings per month" were held with the graduate students during the current month: a memory trace of strong subjective quality may help the Professor decide that both meetings took place. That is because having a memory trace of a strong subjective quality usually means that an event has taken place twice; such a trace can be used inferentially to determine whether a repetition occurred. However, if the Professor's memory trace is of a strong subjective quality for reasons other than repeated behaviour, the subjective quality heuristic will lead to error: the Professor will falsely believe the meeting occurred twice (Kronlund & Whittlesea, 2006). Recently, in an investigation about learning, I provided evidence against two popular retrieval theories (global matching and signal-detection accounts), specified the inference process, and proposed the notion that a "subjective quality heuristic" is used when people are faced with making memory decisions involving judgments of prior re-occurrence (Kronlund, 2006). These findings leave important questions about the mechanism involved in other memory-based cognitive tasks. The broad goal of my research program is to identify the mechanisms involved in cognitive tasks including memory decisions and memory-based choice decisions. To achieve this end, I will carry out 3 empirical investigations that use recognition, recall, and memory-based choice tasks. I will test alternative theories to heuristic processing. I expect that my research program will provide an original and innovative contribution to the scientific study of human memory and human decision-making. Given that my findings will impact knowledge in human learning and memory, it will have vast applications to education and marketing.