Novelty rejection in episodic memory

Abstract

Episodic memory theories have postulated that in recognition, a probe is accepted or rejected on the basis of its global similarity to studied items. Mewhort and Johns (2000) directly tested global similarity predictions by manipulating the feature compositions of probes -- novelty rejection was facilitated when probes contained novel features even when other features strongly matched, an advantage dubbed the extralist feature effect, which greatly challenged global matching models. In this work, we conducted similar experiments using continuously-valued separable- and integral-dimension stimuli. Analogs of extralist lures were constructed where one stimulus dimension contained a value that ..