Semantic similarity between old and new items produces false alarms in recognition memory

Abstract

In everyday life, human beings can report memories of past events that did not occur or that occurred differently from the way they remember them because memory is an imperfect process of reconstruction and is prone to distortion and errors. In this recognition study using word stimuli, we investigated whether a specific operationalization of semantic similarity among concepts can modulate false memories while controlling for the possible effect of associative strength and word co-occurrence in an old-new recognition task. The semantic similarity value of each new concept was calculated as the mean cosine similarity between pairs of vectors representing that new concept and each old concept belonging to the same semantic category. Results showed that, compared with (new) low-similarity concepts, (new) high-similarity concepts had significantly higher probability of being falsely recognized as old, even after partialling out the effect of confounding variables, including associative relatedness and lexical co-occurrence. This finding supports the feature-based view of semantic memory, suggesting that meaning overlap and sharing of semantic features (which are greater when more similar semantic concepts are being processed) have an influence on recognition performance, resulting in more false alarms for new high-similarity concepts. We propose that the associative strength and word co-occurrence among concepts are not sufficient to explain illusory memories but is important to take into account also the effects of feature-based semantic relations, and, in particular, the semantic similarity among concepts.

A density explanation of valence asymmetries in recognition memory

“…The present experiments show that density strongly predicts recognition performance and accounts for valence effects; however, it is not clear which of the different components of density influences recognition. As argued earlier, there is good evidence that semantic similarity among stimuli increases false recognition (e.g., Montefinese et al, 2014). However, some researchers have challenged the idea that item noise itself influences recognition performance (e.g., Dennis & Humphreys, 2001;Maguire, Humphreys, Dennis, & Lee, 2010).…”

“…This effect appears for stimuli such as alphanumeric characters (Flagg, 1976;Reitman & Bower, 1973), geometric shapes (Medin & Schaffer, 1978;Nosofsky, 1991;Nosofsky, Clark, & Shin, 1989), pictures (Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997;Strack & Bless 1994), faces (Busey & Tunnicliff, 1999;Vokey & Read, 1992), words (Brainerd, Reyna, Mojardin, 1999;Dyne, Humphreys, Bain, & Pike, 1990;Montefinese, Zannino, & Ambrosini, 2014;Postman, 1951;Roediger & McDermott, 1995), and sentences (Cantor & Engle, 1993;Holmes, Waters, & Rajaram, 1998).…”

Affective Norms for Italian Words in Older Adults: Age Differences in Ratings of Valence, Arousal and Dominance

“…In particular, the data set included the Italian translation of all the English ANEW words (1,034 words) [12] and those from the Italian semantic norms collected in our laboratory (87 words) [59,60] and tested in behavioral [61,62] and psychophysiological [63] studies.…”

Causal role of the posterior parietal cortex for two-digit mental subtraction and addition: A repetitive TMS study

“…The sample size was chosen based on an a-priori power analysis (G*Power 3 software; Faul et al, 2009) for F tests (see Ambrosini et al, 2013;Montefinese et al, 2015a;Montefinese et al, 2015b). This analysis revealed that our sample size was large enough to detect a significant ( = .05)…”