Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We provide new evidence concerning two views of episodic associations: The independent associations hypothesis (IAH)posits that associations are unidirectional and separately modifiable links (AB; AB); the associative symmetry hypothesis(ASH) considers the association to be a holistic conjunction of A and B representations. While existing literature focuseson tests that compare the correlation of forward and backward associations and favors ASH over IAH, we provide thefirst direct evidence of IAH by showing that forward and backward associations are separately modifiable for semanti-cally related pairs. In two experiments, participants studied 30 semantically unrelated and 30 semantically related pairsintermixed in a single list, and then performed a series of up to eight cued-recall test cycles. All pairs were tested in eachcycle, and the testing direction (A-? or B-?) alternated between cycles. Consistent with prior research, unrelated pairsexhibited associative symmetry accuracy and response times improved gradually on each test, suggesting that testing inboth directions strengthened the same association. In contrast, semantically related pairs exhibited a stair-like pattern,where performance did not change from odd to even tests when the test direction changed; it only improved between testsof the same direction. We conclude that episodic associations can have either a holistic representation (ASH) or separatedirectional representations (IAH), depending on the semantic relatedness of their constituent items.