College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Do I know you?

Study on familiarity-based research nets psychology's Anne Cleary NSF Career Award.
As you are walking down a campus sidewalk someone approaches from the opposite direction.

The face looks familiar but you can’t remember who it is or where you have seen them before.

You mumble "hi," continue on your way still trying to come up with a name.

Almost all of us have had this feeling from time-to-time but where does it come from? And how can someone know that they know something without being able to recall how they know it?

Anne Cleary, assistant professor of psychology, is attempting to answer those questions. Her research is aimed at understanding what features of a situation produce this feeling of familiarity.

"My work is focused on a newly discovered and controversial phenomenon called recognition without identification," Cleary said. "This is the ability people have to recognize fragments of information as part of earlier experienced events, in the absence of an ability to recollect the events themselves."

That research has been enhanced when Cleary recently received a five-year, $400,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to study familiarity-based recognition.

During the five-year study Cleary will look at what features of an experience give rise to later feelings of familiarity and what types of mental processes underlie the subjective sense of familiarity.

Her research is conducted in a lab setting where research participants are presented with objects or words on a computer and then tested on their recognition of those objects and words.

"I've developed several new tasks that create circumstances in the laboratory that will produce familiarity-based recognition," she said.

One of those tasks involves isolating particular features of an item or an event, and examining recognition in cases where the item or event cannot be identified from the features.

Another involves having words or objects flash by very quickly on a screen. The goal is to create a sense of "oh what was that. I don't know what it was I just saw, but I have a feeling I saw it recently," Cleary said.

In one such study, a person's face is flashed very quickly on the computer screen and Cleary examines whether people can have a sense that the person's name was presented recently, even when they cannot call to mind the name itself.

"We try to hold everything constant and look at one aspect of recognition," she said. "We want to isolate instances of recognition that are based on feelings of familiarity."

Cleary's research differs from previous research on this subject. Most research seeks to understand how much of our recognition results from recollection and how much results from familiarity.

Cleary is interested in how familiarity itself operates.

"A better understanding of the familiarity process may someday help individuals who have suffered head injuries that have impaired their recollective abilities, but have left the 'familiarity' ability intact," she said.

"If we can begin to understand why these people still know they are familiar with something, then maybe we can develop techniques to help individuals who suffer these injuries."

The NSF CAREER Award requires that Cleary integrate an educational component with the research. Innovative classroom technology will allow students to respond to questions on wireless remote keypads with their collective responses captured and viewed by the entire class.

The technology will actively engage students in demonstrations of known findings and in the methods use by cognitive psychologists.

Cleary estimates that she has ten to 14 undergraduate students working on her lab's research. She already has one graduate student participating in the project with plans of funding a second with the NSF grant.

"I want to help engage them (Iowa State students) in the research process and how we go about studying how the mind works," she said.