When people can successfully recall a studied word, they should be able to recognize it as having been studied. In cued-recall paradigms, however, participants sometimes correctly recall words in the presence of strong semantic cues but then fail to recognize those words as actually having been studied. Although the conditions necessary to produce this unusual effect are known, the underlying neural correlates have not been investigated. Across five experiments, involving both behavioral and electrophysiological methods (EEG), we investigated the cognitive and neural processes that underlie recognition failures. Experiments 1 and 2 showed behaviorally that assuming that recalled items can be recognized in cued-recall paradigms is a flawed assumption, because recognition failures occur in the presence of cues, regardless of whether those failures are measured. With event-related potentials (ERPs), Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that successfully recalled words that are recognized are driven by recollection at recall and then by a combination of recollection and familiarity at ensuing recognition. In contrast, recognition failures did not show that memory signature and may instead be driven by semantic priming at recall and followed at recognition stages by negative-going ERP effects consistent with implicit processes, such as repetition fluency. These results demonstrate that recall – long-characterized as predominantly reflecting recollection-based processing in episodic memory – may at times also be served by a confluence of implicit cognitive processes.

当人们能够成功回忆起一个学习过的单词时，他们应该能够识别出它已经被学习过。然而，在提示回忆范式中，参与者有时会在存在强烈语义提示的情况下正确回忆单词，但随后无法识别出这些单词实际上已经被研究过。尽管产生这种不寻常效应的必要条件是已知的，但潜在的神经相关性尚未得到研究。通过涉及行为和电生理学方法 (EEG) 的五项实验，我们研究了识别失败背后的认知和神经过程。实验 1 和 2 在行为上表明，假设回忆的项目可以在提示回忆范式中被识别是一个有缺陷的假设，因为识别失败发生在提示存在的情况下，无论这些失败是否被测量。通过事件相关电位 (ERP)，实验 3 和 4 表明，成功回忆并识别的单词是由回忆时的回忆驱动的，然后是随后识别时的回忆和熟悉度的结合驱动的。相比之下，识别失败并没有表现出记忆特征，而是可能由回忆时的语义启动驱动，并在识别阶段受到与内隐过程一致的负面 ERP 效应（例如重复流畅性）的影响。这些结果表明，回忆——长期以来主要反映情景记忆中基于回忆的处理——有时也可能由内隐认知过程的融合提供服务。