ABSTRACT
One of Larry Jacoby’s major contributions is the idea that remembering is in large part an attribution. In many brilliant studies, he and his collaborators showed that the effects of past experience on present performance can be interpreted in a variety of ways, with important implications for the subjective experience of remembering. When an effort to recall a past event orients attention to one’s past, an experience of fluency may accompany that event, often resulting in an increased feeling of familiarity (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989). When attention is drawn to other facets of the current situation, however, that same subjective experience can produce very different attributions. Jacoby showed, for example, that the fluency associated with a recall experience can make background noise seem less noisy ( Jacoby, Allan, Collins, & Larwill, 1988), anagrams seem easy (Kelley & Jacoby, 1996), and obscure names seem famous (Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, & Jasechko, 1989).
