Technical Report; Human memory

[Mark Chappell]

The paper whose abstract appears below has recently been submitted.
It (paper.ps or paper.ps.Z) may be anonymously ftped from

hydra.psy.cmu.edu,

in directory

/pub/user/markc.

If this is not possible hard copies may be obtained from Barbara Dorney;

bd1q at crab.psy.cmu.edu.

Technical Report PDP.CNS.95.2

Familiarity Breeds Differentiation:
A Bayesian Approach to the Effects of
Experience in Recognition Memory

James L. McClelland and Mark Chappell

As people become better at identifying studied items, they also become
better at rejecting distractor items.  A model of recognition is
presented consisting of item detectors that learn estimates of conditional
probabilities of items' features, exhibiting this differentiation
effect.  The model is used to account for a number of findings in the
recognition memory literature, including a null list-strength effect,
a list-length effect, non-linear effects of strengthening items on
false recognition of similar distractors, a number of different kinds
of mirror effects, and appropriate $z$-ROC curves.