We argue that to understand how a recognition task is solved, it is helpful to study the inferences that are drawn on the basis of psychological self-knowledge. This claim is supported by findings from 3 experiments in which participants' metacognitive knowledge was either measured or manipulated. Specifically, it was found that when the quality of a recollective experience was not associated with one particular cause, knowledge about whether one would have noted or remembered a stimulus is used. In conclusion, we argue that a perspective that is derived from attribution theory in social psychology may be fruitfully applied to phenomena of recognition.
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