Real-world recognition requires our memory system to accommodate perceptual changes that occur after encoding; for example, eyewitnesses must recognize perpetrators across changes in appearance. However, it is not clear how this flexible recognition ability can be improved: Standard encoding strategies not only tend to be ineffective, but can in fact be detrimental for recognizing people across appearance changes. Given the effectiveness of visual imagery in creating and modifying memory representations, we examined whether counterfactual visual imagery could be used to manipulate flexible recognition by simulating an increase in encoding–retrieval similarity. Across two experiments, participants (n = 317) encoded faces with neutral expressions and were cued to imagine the faces with either happy or angry expressions. During later retrieval, participants saw lineups of old and new faces with either happy or angry expressions, and selected the old face and provided recognition confidence. Old/new recognition discriminability and confidence were higher when a face’s expression at retrieval matched the expression that it was imagined in during encoding (i.e., congruent imagery); interestingly, however, there was Bayesian evidence for no benefit of imagery congruence for face-choice accuracy. Moreover, congruent imagery improved recognition for old arrays irrespective of whether participants correctly selected the old face, suggesting that the imagery manipulation influenced a diffuse sense of recognition without influencing the ability to attribute that sense of recognition to a specific stimulus. Together, these findings indicate that visual imagery can directionally manipulate recognition for changed faces and produces a novel dissociation between old/new recognition and forced-choice accuracy.

Prediction errors drive learning by signaling mismatches between expectations and reality, but the neural systems supporting these computations rem...

Episodic memory and semantic knowledge can each exert strong influences on visual attention when we search through real-world scenes. However, there is debate surrounding how they interact when both are present; specifically, results conflict as to whether memory consistently improves visual search when semantic knowledge is available to guide search. These conflicting results could be driven by distinct effects of different types of episodic memory, but this possibility has not been examined. To test this, we tracked participants’ eyes while they searched for objects in semantically congruent and incongruent locations within scenes during a study and test phase. In the test phase containing studied and new scenes, participants gave confidence-based recognition memory judgments that indexed different types of episodic memory (i.e., recollection, familiarity, unconscious memory) for the background scenes, then they searched for the target. We found that semantic knowledge consistently influenced both early and late eye movements, but the influence of memory depended on the type of memory involved. Recollection improved first saccade accuracy in terms of heading towards the target in both congruent and incongruent scenes. In contrast, unconscious memory gradually improved scanpath efficiency over the course of search, but only when semantic knowledge was relatively ineffective (i.e., incongruent scenes). Together, these findings indicate that episodic memory and semantic knowledge are rationally integrated to optimize attentional guidance, such that the most precise or effective forms of information available – which depends on the type of episodic memory available – are prioritized.