The role of context in producing item interactions and false memories

Abstract

[Abstract]: Cued recall with an extralist cue posed a challenge for traditional learning theory and is still a challenge for contemporary memory theory. Two of the contemporary challenges are to explain how episodic and semantic information is combined to and the presence of item interaction effects in this task. Five experiments demonstrate item interactions between an associate of the cue and words in the study list which are phonologically similar to that associate but otherwise unrelated to the cue. These interactions are far stronger in cued recall than in primed free association and they include false memories. The combination of episodic and semantic information and the item interactions can be explained by a class of models which posit distributed representations and which assume that the cue activates its associates and a contextual cue activates the list items. Linkages are drawn between the use of context in this setting and in other settings.