Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Connectionist models of memory account for recall behavior using processes which simultaneously access multiple memory traces and interactively construct the recalled information. This also allows the models to account for prototyping phenomena, but seems to predict retrieval of composite or "blended" information during ordinary recall. By contrast, models that simulate recall as a probabilistic selection of a single trace would not predict recall blend errors. To examine memory blending during recall, three experiments were performed; in each, subjects read sentences, some sharing words with one other sentence. They later recalled the sentences given partial-sentence cues. In all experiments subjects made blend errors, recalling one word from each of two similar sentences more often than one word from each of two dissimilar sentences, as predicted by multiple-trace models. The frequency of blend errors was relatively low, but a good account of this and other aspects of the results was provided by a multipletrace model based on an Interactive Activation network