Welcome to the Recognition and Metacognition Lab!

We are a memory and cognition lab at the University of Southern Mississippi. Led by Dr. Andrew Huebert, we study a number of different topics that all center around the concepts of retrieval failure and familiarity detection. People often temporarily forget things like someone's name or an answer to a question. This is retrieval failure. While retrieval failure might be frustrating, we can often still recognize something as familiar despite being unable to recall specifics. 

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This familiarity detection has long been viewed a secondary, error prone method of recognition to be used when recall fails. One focus of our lab is understanding the powerful feelings familiarity can create. Feelings such as false recollection, illusory prediction, illusory partial recollection, and most recently, curiosity and information seeking. This research also connects heavily to tip of the tongue states and deja vu.

 

The second main focus of our lab is understanding the feature matching process behind familiarity detection. With familiarity detection being such a powerful feeling, we also aim to understand how it is created. When we encounter something, we encode the features of that item into memory. When we encounter it again later, we try to match up the features of the current stimulus with the features stored in memory. A big part of our research is understanding this process. Are certain types of features more important than others? Is the feature matching process flexible? Are certain feature locations more important than others? We often draw from existing literature on processing various kinds of stimuli. For example, if research suggests a special status of first and last letters, or earlier parts of a song, or eyes over mouths, we can ask if similar ideas apply to generating familiarity.

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