How level of processing really influences awareness in recognition memory

In yes/no and two-alternative forced-choice recognition tests, subjects reported one of three states of awareness when selecting each target: remembering, knowing, or guessing. A remember response indicated recollection of the target's occurrence in the study list. A know response indicated the target was familiar in the experimental context but not recollected. A guess response indicated the target was selected in the absence of either remembering or knowing. In Experiments 1 and 2, level of processing influenced remember responses but not know responses and, in Experiment 3, generating versus reading similarly influenced remember but not know responses. In each experiment, when subjects reported that they were guessing they showed no ability to discriminate targets from lures. These results show that remember/know findings generalize from yes/no to two-alternative forced-choice recognition and that knowing is dissociable from guessing. The results also provide no support for the hypothesis, based on an independence model of remembering and knowing, and some other apparently contradictory results, that variables that have large effects on remembering produce opposite effects on knowing. A meta-analysis of previous level-of-processing studies yielded evidence consistent with these conclusions.