Participants provided information about their childhood by rating the confidence that they had experienced various events (e.g., 'broke a window playing ball'). On some trials, participants unscrambled a key word from the event-phrase (e.g., wdinwo – window) or an unrelated word (e.g., gnutge...

According to the recognition heuristic (RH) theory, decisions follow the recognition principle: Given a high validity of the recognition cue, people should prefer recognized choice options compared to unrecognized ones. Assuming that the memory strength of choice options is strongly correlated...