Familiarity influences on direct and indirect associative memory for objects in scenes

Remembering arbitrary associations, such as unrelated word pairs or object–background pairs, appears to depend on recollection. However, for cases in which the components of an association share pre-existing semantic relations, can familiarity support associative recognition? In two experiments with congruent object–background pairings, we found that participants were successful at direct and indirect associative recognition in both 1000 ms time restriction (speeded) and unlimited response time (non-speeded) test conditions. Because dual-process theory postulates that familiarity is less impacted by speeded responses, relative to recollection, these findings suggest that congruent object–background associations may not necessitate recollection when an arbitrary link is not constructed at encoding. Experiment 3 compared direct associative memory for congruent and incongruent object–background pairs in speeded and non-speeded test conditions. We found that participants in the non-speeded condition performed comparably with congruent and incongruent pairs, whereas those in the speeded condition performed significantly worse on the incongruent pairs than on the congruent pairs. Together, these findings suggest a differential role of familiarity and recollection depending on the types of associations. Implications for dual-process recognition memory models and levels of unitization framework are discussed.