Barzykowski and Moulin (B&M) postulate that there is a relation between the déjà vu experience and involuntary autobiographical memory. We found their article to be rich in important insights into the nature of human memory as well as a valuable review of two important phenomena. However, we focus our criticism on the logic behind the rationale for equating the two phenomena. To quote from their abstract, B&M write “we hypothesise that both can be described as ‘involuntary’ or spontaneous cognitions, where IAMs deliver content and feeling of retrieval and déjà vu delivers only the feeling of retrieval.” Although we understand that the bulk of their paper explores the common retrieval processes that occur during involuntary autobiographical memory and déjà vu, we argue that in order to understand both of these phenomena, one must separate the processes involved in memory retrieval and the processes involved in conscious experience. Referring to Tulving's challenge to the Doctrine of Concordance (Schwartz, Reference Schwartz1999; Tulving, Reference Tulving1989), we assert that too often we assume that conscious experience derives from the same processes that produce retrieval, but, in reality, the conscious experience is often the product of different processes, including metacognitive processes.

Tulving (Reference Tulving1989) argued that research in cognitive psychology assumed that cognitive processes, behavior, and conscious experience are closely correlated. In reviewing past work, he argued that cognitive psychology opened up the field to study hidden underlying processes, but that the next step was to look at the nature of consciousness and how it relates to cognitive processes. He argued that research needed to explore the nature of conscious experience and where it did not line up with cognitive processing. For an example, he cites implicit memory in which retrieval occurs without conscious access. Building on Tulving's (Reference Tulving1989) framework, Schwartz (Reference Schwartz1999) argued that, at least in some cases, that one set of cognitive processes may be responsible for retrieval, but a separate cognitive process may be responsible for the conscious experience that accompanies retrieval and output of retrieved memories.

In our work on tip-of-the-tongue states, we showed that processes that lead to failed retrieval are dissociable from the processes that produce tip-of-the-tongue states (Schwartz & Pournaghdali, Reference Schwartz, Pournaghdali, Cleary and Schwartz2021). Early seminal work on tip-of-the-tongue states (e.g., Brown & McNeill, Reference Brown and McNeill1966) worked on the assumption that the cause of the experience of the tip-of-the-tongue state was word-retrieval failure. However, our work, inspired by Tulving's (Reference Tulving1989) approach, shows that the processes that produce the tip-of-the-tongue state are more related to the processing of the cue or question than to access to the target or answer. For example, the familiarity of the cue (i.e., the question or stimulus) influences the reported number of tip-of-the-tongue states. Metcalfe, Schwartz, and Joaquim (Reference Metcalfe, Schwartz and Joaquim1993) showed that repeating the cue, but not repeating the target, led to more tip-of-the-tongue states. More recently, Lee, Pournaghdali, and Schwartz (Reference Lee, Pournaghdali and Schwartz2022) showed that more fluently processed faces led to more tip-of-the-tongue states for the target name. This shows that with tip-of-the-tongue states, the fluent processing of a cue leads to a greater chance of a subjective experience about the target. The example of tip-of-the-tongue states supports the need to examine the processes of conscious experience as not being identical to the process of retrieval, consistent with Tulving's (Reference Tulving1989) challenge to the Doctrine of Concordance.

We suspect that with both déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memory, the subjective experience may be dissociable from the memory processes. Indeed, with respect to autobiographical memory, Neisser et al. (Reference Neisser, Abreu, Drane, Pederson, Parsons, Cleary and McNeely-White2023) distinguished between retrieval from autobiographical memory and the experience of mental time travel. Neisser et al. point to the observation that some amnesic patients can retrieve events from their past, but they lack the subjective experience of mental time travel, which they call the “feeling of pastness.” Neisser et al. argue that these feelings of pastness are better thought of as a metacognitive experience about their retrieved memories, and, thus, support a challenge to the Doctrine of Concordance, because they are separable from retrieval.

We argue that evaluating the nature of the dissociation between a conscious experience and memory retrieval, as well as the possible interaction between the two is of critical importance. In our work, we have used a multidimensional extension of signal detection theory called general recognition theory (Ashby & Soto, Reference Ashby and Soto2015). We showed dissociation between the conscious experience of perceiving a face and facial-expression recognition (Pournaghdali, Schwartz, Hays, & Soto, Reference Pournaghdali, Schwartz, Hays and Soto2023). However, our results indicate that the two phenomena are associated in a way that, in the absence of conscious experience, the strength of face recognition processes weakens but remains significantly above chance level, suggesting very complex relations between the object- and meta-level processes. Following from our work, general recognition theory can be extended to study dissociations and interactions between conscious experience and memory retrieval. Based on this, we argue that this approach is a suitable framework to evaluate different aspects of the Doctrine of Concordance. More specifically, the nature of the dissociations between cognitive processes and conscious experience can be tested using general recognition theory with high precision.

Although B&M declare themselves “agnostic” on the relation on how experience maps onto process, we argue that exploring this relation is important. Returning to our wheelhouse, thinking about the tip-of-the-tongue experience in terms of a model in which the retrieval failure and the phenomenology were not identical has led to great progress in understanding tip-of-the-tongue states (e.g., Huebert, McNeely-White, & Cleary, Reference Huebert, McNeely-White and Cleary2023). Thus, we think it is important to clarify the role of retrieval from autobiographical memory and the feeling of pastness in involuntary autobiographical memory and to clarify the role of familiarity processes in memory and the subjective experience of a déjà vu.