A Hybrid-Similarity Exemplar Model for Predicting Distinctiveness Effects in Perceptual Old-New Recognition.

Abstract

In 2 sets of experiments, the authors investigated the basis for old-item distinctiveness effects in perceptual recognition, whereby distinctive old items are recognized with higher probability than are typical old items. In Experiment 1, distinctive old items were defined as those lying in isolated regions of a continuous-dimension similarity space. In this case, any beneficial effects of distinctiveness were absent or small, regardless of the structure of the test list used to assess recognition memory. In Experiment 2, distinctive items were defined as those objects containing certain discrete, individuating features. In this case, large old-item distinctive effects were observed, with the nature of the effects being modulated by the structure of the test lists. A hybrid-similarity exemplar model, combining elements of continuous-dimension distance and discrete-feature matching, was used to account for these distinctiveness effects in the recognition data.

A Dynamic Approach to Recognition Memory

“…In particular, such theories posit that the representations of low frequency words in memory are more distinctive (Schmidt, 1991;Nosofsky & Zaki, 2003). According to the REM model (Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997, this distinctiveness manifests in the features used to encode the words themselves.…”

“…If g is lower for probe features, there will be fewer traces in memory that happen to share the probe's value on that feature by chance, thus lowering the false alarm rate. Contrariwise, if there is a target trace in memory, a match when g is low provides stronger evidence that the probe and trace encode the same event, thus increasing the likelihood ratio for the target trace (termed "self-match" by Nosofsky & Zaki, 2003) and thereby increasing the hit rate.…”

Face-Space: A Unifying Concept in Face Recognition Research

“…The hybrid-similarity model of recognition memory (Nosofsky & Zaki, 2003) was applied by Zarkadi, Wade, and Stewart (2009) to model eyewitness performance for 'concealment' and 'replication' lineups. In the hybrid-similarity model, similarity between two faces is a combination of the distance between the faces in a multidimensional similarity space or face-space (Nosofsky, 1986), and the number of discrete features that are shared and unshared (Tversky, 1977).…”

Memory strength versus memory variability in visual change detection

“…Forms of Eq. 3 have been used successfully in past efforts to model perceptual recognition data (e.g., Nosofsky et al, 2011;Nosofsky et al, 2014;Nosofsky & Zaki, 2003;Shin & Nosofsky, 1992) and it is useful to consider its underpinnings. The factor M t ⋅ s can be viewed as the degree to which the memory trace of the to-be-remembered item is activated by the test probe.…”