Precise and imprecise memories may fool you: Continuous memory measures uncover different sources of errors in recognition memory [post]

Franziska Rebekka Richter
2020 unpublished
Recognition memory, our ability to judge if we have seen a stimulus before, can be faulty. Participants sometimes incorrectly judge unseen stimuli as seen before, otherwise known as false alarms (FAs), or seen stimuli as not seen, known as misses. However, the sources of these classification errors during the retrieval process remain not fully understood. FAs to similar stimuli have been suggested to be due to interference resulting in abnormal pattern separation and pattern completion, and are
more » ... at least partially driven by recollection processes. Misclassifying old identical items as merely similar, in contrast, could be due to decay of the memories, and/or to overly strict criteria exerted by participants at decision time. This study combines an identical(old)/similar/new recognition memory task with a location memory precision task to explore differences in recognition memory errors. Across participants, performance in both tasks was correlated. Further, the results demonstrated that while FAs to similar but unseen items are associated with surprisingly high memory precision, possibly caused by location-memory based recollection signals, incorrect classification of identical items as 'similar' is associated with a marked decline in memory precision. This result is suggestive of misses being due to decay processes rather than the employment of an overly strict rejection criterion alone. Consistently, item characteristics such as increasing item saliency affected the likelihood of FAs, but did not increase the likelihood of incorrect 'similar' responses to identical items. Misses of especially salient items were instead associated with poor memory precision, again suggestive of memory decay mechanisms playing a role in these classification errors. Lastly, incorrect 'new' ratings to both identical and similar items showed most severely decreased memory precision, over and above that seen for other memory misclassifications.
doi:10.31234/osf.io/btg8q fatcat:ofoh2glxcfhgfcf7xkuvk7wcw4