The importance of knowledge in vivid text memory: an individual-differences investigation of recollection and familiarity.

The goal of this study was to examine how individual variation in readers' skills and, in particular, their background knowledge about a text are related to text memory. Recollection and familiarity estimates were obtained from remember and know judgments to text ideas. Recollection estimates to old items were predicted by readers' background knowledge, but not by other comprehension-related factors, such as word-decoding skill and working memory capacity. False alarms involving recollection of new items (inferences) were diminished as a function of verbal ability, working memory capacity, and reasoning but increased as a function of background knowledge. The results suggest that recollection indexes the reader's ability to construct a text representation in which text ideas are integrated with relevant domain knowledge. Moreover, these results highlight the importance of background knowledge in explaining individual variation in comprehension and memory for text.