Accounting for the build-up of proactive interference across lists in a list length paradigm reveals a dominance of item-noise in recognition memory

Abstract

There has been a longstanding debate concerning whether interference in recognition memory is attributable to other items on the study list (i.e., item-noise) or to prior memories (i.e., context-noise and background-noise). Recently, Osth and Dennis (2015) devised a global matching model that could estimate the magnitude of each interference contribution and they found that context-noise and background-noise were dominant in recognition. In the present investigation, data from a list length experiment were analysed using variants of the Osth, Jansson, Dennis, and Heathcote (2018) model, that integrates the memory retrieval components of the Osth and Dennis (2015) model with the diffusion dec..