FAMILIARITY BREEDS DIFFERENTIATION - A SUBJECTIVE-LIKELIHOOD APPROACHTO THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE IN RECOGNITION MEMORY

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 dete ctors that learn estimates of conditional probabilities of item featur es. The model is used to account for a number of findings in the recog nition memory literature, including (a) the basic differentiation effe ct (strength-mirror effect), (b) the fact that adding items to a list reduces recognition accuracy (list-length effect) but extra study of s ome items does not reduce recognition accuracy for other items (null l ist-strength effect), (c) nonlinear effects of strengthening items on false recognition of similar distractors, (d) a number of different ki nds of mirror effects, (e) appropriate z-ROC curves, and (f) one type of deviation from optimality exhibited in recognition experiments.