Remembering source evidence from associatively related items: explanations from a global matching model

Abstract

The authors tested source memory across three conditions, one in which 3 strongly associated primes of a target word were presented in the same source as the target, one in which primes were presented in a different source than the target, and one in which no associates of targets were encoded. In the first 2 experiments, target source memory increased in the same-prime condition and decreased in the different-prime condition relative to the no-prime condition. In Experiment 3, the different-prime condition created the illusion that target words had been presented in both sources at encoding. The MINERVA 2 model (D. L. Hintzman, 1988) was able to predict these effects by basing source decisions on the global match of source-specific retrieval probes to all of the items in the memory set.