Recognition Memory - Historical Overview

Historical Overview

The phenomenon of familiarity and recognition has long been described in books and poems. Within the field of Psychology, recognition memory was first alluded to by Wilhelm Wundt in his concept of know-againness or assimilation of a former memory image to a new one. The first formal attempt to describe recognition was by the English Doctor Arthur Wigan in his book “Duality of the Mind.” Here he describes the feelings of familiarity we experience as being due to the brain being a double organ. In essence we perceive things with one half of our brain and if they somehow get lost in translation to the other side of the brain this causes the feeling of recognition when we again see said object, person etc. However, he incorrectly assumed that these feelings occur only when the mind is exhausted (from hunger, lack of sleep etc.). His description, though elementary compared to current knowledge, set the groundwork and sparked interest in this topic for subsequent researchers. Arthur Allin (1896) was the first person to publish an article attempting to explicitly define and differentiate between subjective and objective definitions of the experience of recognition although his findings are based mostly on introspections. Allin corrects Wigan’s notion of the exhausted mind by asserting that this half-dream state is not the process of recognition. He rather briefly refers to the physiological correlates of this mechanism as having to do with the cortex but does not go into detail as to where these substrates are located. His objective explanation of the lack of recognition is when a person observes an object for a second time and experiences the feeling of familiarity that they experienced this object at a previous time. Woodsworth (1913) and Margaret and Edward Strong (1916) were the first people to experimentally use and record findings employing the delayed matching to sample task to analyze recognition memory. Following this Benton Underwood was the first person to analyze the concept of recognition errors in relation to words in 1969. He deciphered that these recognition errors occur when words have similar attributes. Next came attempts to determine the upper limits of recognition memory, a task that Standing (1973) endeavored. He determined that the capacity for pictures is almost limitless. In 1980 George Mandler introduced the recollection-familiarity distinction, more formally known as the dual process theory