title: Familiarity breeds differentiation: a subjective-likelihood approach to the effects of experience in recognition memory.
abstract: With repeated exposure, people become better at identifying presented items and better at rejecting items that have not been presented. This differentiation effect is captured in a model consisting of item detectors that learn estimates of conditional probabilities of item features. The model is used to account for a number of findings in the recognition memory literature, including (a) the basic differentiation effect (strength-mirror effect), (b) the fact that adding items to a list reduces recognition accuracy (list-length effect) but extra study of some items does not reduce recognition accuracy for other items (null list-strength effect), (c) nonlinear effects of strengthening items on false recognition of similar distractors, (d) a number of different kinds of mirror effects, (e) appropriate z-ROC curves, and (f) one type of deviation from optimality exhibited in recognition experiments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. jlm@cnbc.cmu.edu
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: McClelland
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chappell
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical