Similarity and Associative Recognition

Conjunction errors in recognition: Emergent structure and metacognitive control

“…It is true that most such effects have been observed with single-item stimuli. However, Greene and Tussing (2001), using an associative recognition task, found that a semantic relationship between the two words of a pair produced elevated rates of false alarms just as predicted by fluency. The critical difference between their stimuli and the pictures used here is that words of a pair, even if related, are still likely viewed as two discrete units rather than a single, emergent unit.…”

“…Whatever its source, the fluency hypothesis predicts that misattributed fluency will lead to higher rates of conjunction errors for SS lures. Indirect support for the fluency hypothesis can be found in a study by Greene and Tussing (2001), who examined the effect of inter-item similarity on the recognition of word pairs. They found that false alarms increased when a semantic relationship existed between the words of a pair, consistent with the notion that semantic coherence produces a sense of fluency.…”

Level of discrimination for recognition judgments reduced following the recognition of semantically related words

“…Performance in the Prime Word Old condition, however, reflected the effect of a test word-list word relationship as well as the effect of a test word-prime word relationship. Past work suggests that correct recognition judgments to new test words may be impeded when a relationship of the former sort is present (Greene & Klein, 2004;Greene & Tussing, 2001;Neely & Balota, 1981). Thus, the interaction that was observed here and in Experiment 1C may reflect the fact that correct judgments to new test words were impeded by a test word-prime word relationship in the Prime Word New condition and by a test word-list word relationship as well as a test word-prime word relationship in the Prime Word Old condition The fact that this interaction was observed only intermittently in the present study suggests that the effect of a test word-list word relationship was generally small.…”

Parallel interactive retrieval of item and associative information from event memory

“…A less restrictive approach would be to use random word pairs (e.g., baby-voyage) and replace them with synonyms (e.g., infant-journey) under the assumption that the overlapping semantic features between the component words would yield similar relational properties in each case. Although within-pair semantic similarity has been found to yield greater rates of both correct and false recognition of word pairs (Greene & Tussing, 2001), it is not clear whether preserving only a portion of the semantic features of each word would be very effective in preserving any associative information. Images from the same scene preserve both low-level visual features (e.g., color distribution) and high-level semantics (scene content or "gist"; Andermane & Bowers, 2015), whereas synonymous words tend to share only high-level features but have different low-level features (spelling/pronunciation).…”

“…These models offer little guidance, however, regarding how those representations actually enter into memory in the first place. Pre-existing semantic or similarity relations between items lead to stronger encoding of an association (Thomson & Tulving, 1970;Dosher, 1984;Dosher & Rosedale, 1991;Greene & Tussing, 2001), and interference only occurs between pairs that are made of the same types of items (e.g., word-word versus word-face pairs; Criss & Shiffrin, 2005), such that it is clear that associative information depends at least in part on the information contained in the associated items, especially relational features and features shared between items. While memory models of all stripes could easily implement this phenomenon, none of them predict it a priori.…”