Schedule of Events | Symposia

Towards a Unified Theory of Memory for Similar Episodes

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 1 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Grand Ballroom.

Andrew yonelinas¹ (apyonelinas@ucdavis.edu), Colleen Parks, Chris Wahlheim; ¹University of California Davis, ²University of Nevada, Las Vegas, ³The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Important advances have been made in understanding the roles that recollection and familiarity, true and false memory, as well as pattern separation and pattern completion play in episodic memory using several experimental paradigms that examine memory for lures that are similar - but not identical - to prior episodes. These include the Process Dissociation Procedure, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm and the Mnemonic Similarity Task. However, research using each of these paradigms has remained largely isolated, and a coherent theoretical integration is lacking. We argue that these paradigms can be understood within a unified theory in which memory performance reflects the operation of three distinct processes: false recollection, false familiarity and recollection rejection. We review studies that have included memory confidence judgments in each of these paradigms and show how those results can be used to measure each process. The results indicate that these three memory processes are functionally distinct and they underly performance in each experimental paradigm. This new approach overcomes limitations of earlier methods, it bridges these different literatures, and it points to several open questions for future research.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic