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  Research Interests:

I study human memory. My primary research interest is in people's ability to recognize items and events as having been experienced previously. In particular, I am interested in familiarity-based discrimination between recently and non-recently presented items.

One question that my current research attempts to address concerns the nature of the features that are used in recognition. According to many theories of human memory, the items and events that we encounter are not simply stored into memory as holistic units, but rather, are somehow broken down into their constituent features, and stored as a compilation of these features.  Much of my research attempts to address what these features are.  For example, how might a word be broken down into constituent features for use in later recognition? A picture? The primary tool that I use for conducting these investigations is the recognition without identification (RWI) paradigm (Cleary & Greene, 2000; Peynircioglu, 1990).

Another question that my research attempts to address concerns the nature of familiarity. Many describe familiarity-based recognition in terms of signal detection theory. My research attempts to address what role particular features of items play in the signal detection processes that may sometimes contribute to recognition.

A third line of my research focuses on what role existing knowledge structures may play in feelings of familiarity. This line of research is aimed at investigating whether existing knowledge structures can give rise to familiarity signals, what types of knowledge structures may do so, and what, if any, relationship exists between the feelings of familiarity that are often used in recognition, and the feelings that give rise to tip-of-the-tongue states (when people feel that a word is in memory and that recall is imminent, yet are unable to access the word).

A fourth line of my research is aimed at investigating how existing knowledge representations contribute to the recognition of prior occurrence more generally. That is, I am interested in how existing knowledge representations contribute to recollection-based as well as familiarity-based recognition, and how existing knowledge structures may contribute to false recognition. I am particularly interested in how knowledge of structural regularity contributes to the later recognition of a newly encountered stimulus. 

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Recent, Representative Publications:

        Cleary, A. M. (in press). Relating familiarity-based recognition and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Detecting a word's recency in the absence of access to the word. Memory & Cognition.  

        Cleary, A. M. (2005). ROCs in recognition with and without identification. Memory, 5, 472-483.

        Cleary, A. M., & Greene, R. L. (2005). Recognition without perceptual identification: A measure of familiarity? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58A, 1143-1152.

        Cleary, A. M., Langley, M. M., & Seiler, K. R. (2004). Recognition without picture identification: Geons as components of the pictorial memory trace.    Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 903-908. (Click here for pdf)

        Cleary, A. M. (2004).  Orthography, phonology, and meaning: Word features that give rise to feelings of familiarity in recognition.  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 446-451. (Click here for pdf)

        Cleary, A. M., & Greene, R. L. (2004).  True and false memory in the absence of perceptual identification.  Memory, 12, 231-236.

        Curran, T., & Cleary, A. M. (2003).  Using ERPs to dissociate recollection from familiarity in picture recognition.  Cognitive Brain Research, 15, 191-205.

        Cleary, A. M. (2002).  Recognition with and without identification: Dissociative effects of meaningful encoding.  Memory & Cognition, 30, 758-767.

        Cleary, A. M., & Greene, R. L. (2002).  Paradoxical effects of presentation modality on false memory. Memory, 10, 55-61.

        Cleary, A. M., & Greene, R. L. (2001). Memory for unidentified items: Evidence for the use of letter information in familiarity processes.  Memory & Cognition,29, 540-545.

        Cleary, A. M., Curran, T., & Greene, R. L. (2001).  Memory for detail in item versus associative recognition. Memory & Cognition, 29, 413-423.

        Cleary, A. M., & Greene, R. L. (2000).  Recognition without identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1063-1069.