Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Using hierarchical Bayesian estimation of RT distributions, wepresent a novel application of Systems Factorial Technology(Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) to the retrieval of item and asso-ciative information from episodic memory. We find that itemand associative information are retrieved concurrently, withpositive memory evidence arising from a holistic match be-tween the test pair and the contents of memory, in which bothitem and associative matches are pooled together into a sin-gle source. This retrieval architecture is inconsistent with bothstrictly serial processing and independence of item and asso-ciative information. Pooling of item and associative matchesimplies that while item and associative information may beseparable, they are not qualitatively different, nor are quali-tatively different processes (e.g., familiarity vs. recollection)used to retrieve these kinds of information.