CONFIGURAL PROCESSING IN MEMORY RETRIEVAL - MULTIPLE CUES AND ENSEMBLE REPRESENTATIONS

When retrieving information from memory, a number of contextual cues m ay interact to determine which ideas will be easily accessible. Even t he simplest case in which joint cue action obtains (two cues) is very revealing of the principles of memory access and representation of com pounds. Mechanisms by which dual cues interact to constrain retrieval from episodic memory are considered. A holistic mechanism of cue integ ration is contrasted with two nonholistic mechanisms: a multiplicative or intersection mechanism and an independent-contributions mechanism. Holistic- and intersection-cuing mechanisms are consistent with diffe rent variants of compound cue models of priming. The independent cuing mechanism is consistent with spreading activation models of priming. Data from four experiments which examined dual-cued recognition of ite ms from (newly learned) triples demonstrated strongly configural, holi stic, action of dual cues. The two cues and test item must form an enc oded compound to yield cuing advantages. Two independent cues to the t est item are ineffective if the two cues and test were not learned tog ether as a triple; one valid and one invalid cue are also ineffective. This is so despite the availability of pairwise information for each cue-test relation, and despite the fact that these cues are effective when operating alone. A compound cue model which predicts precisely th is surprising pattern of priming is developed. The compound cue model also predicts previously obtained configural priming of associative ju dgments, as well as the bias priming generally observed in item recogn ition and similar paradigms. (C) 1997 Academic Press.