The spatiotemporal gradient of intrusion errors in continuous outcome source memory: Source retrieval is affected by both guessing and intrusions

Abstract

Previous research has characterized source retrieval as a thresholded process, which fails on a proportion of trials and leads to guessing, as opposed to a continuous process, in which response precision varies across trials but is never zero. The thresholded view of source retrieval is largely based on the observation of heavy tailed distributions of response errors, thought to reflect a large proportion of “memoryless” trials. In this study, we investigate whether these errors might instead reflect systematic intrusions from other list items which can mimic source guessing. Using the circular diffusion model of decision making, which accounts for both response errors and RTs we found that ..