Dissociating Appraisals of Accuracy and Recollection in Autobiographical Remembering

Recent studies of metamemory appraisals implicated in autobiographical remembering have established distinct roles for judgments of occurrence, recollection, and accuracy for past events. In studies involving everyday remembering, measures of recollection and accuracy correlate highly (>.85). Thus although their measures are structurally distinct, such high correspondence might suggest conceptual redundancy. This article examines whether recollection and accuracy dissociate when studying different types of autobiographical event representations. In Study 1, 278 participants described a believed memory, a nonbelieved memory, and a believed-not-remembered event and rated each on occurrence, recollection, accuracy, and related covariates. In Study 2, 876 individuals described and rated 1 of these events, as well as an event about which they were uncertain about their memory. Confirmatory structural equation modeling indicated that the measurement dissociation between occurrence, recollection and accuracy held across all types of events examined. Relative to believed memories, the relationship between recollection and belief in accuracy was meaningfully lower for the other event types. These findings support the claim that recollection and accuracy arise from distinct underlying mechanisms.