Can cue familiarity during recall failure prompt illusory recollective experience?

Recognition memory is thought to involve two bases: familiarity (a sense that something was encountered previously) and recollection (retrieval of specifics or context). The present study investigated the hypothesis that a sensation of familiarity during cued-recall failure might increase illusory recollective experience. This hypothesis was driven, in part, by the suggestion in the literature that the type of familiarity-driven recollective confabulation often seen in populations experiencing memory impairment might actually be a common feature of normal human memory. We examined the hypothesis that as perceived cue familiarity increases during the uncertainty of target retrieval failure, so does illusory recollection of a contextual detail. Toward this end, we systematically varied the amount of cue-to-target(s) surface feature-overlap in the recognition without cued recall paradigm, which has been shown to increase perceived cue familiarity during target recall failure. Increasing perceived cue familiarity during target retrieval failure led to increased confidence in knowing a contextual detail that was not actually known. As perceived cue familiarity increased, so did erroneous confidence in knowing the arrow direction (left or right) that supposedly accompanied the unretrieved target (Experiment 1), the background color (Experiment 2), and whether an accompanying tone was high or low (Experiment 3).